The Geoscope / Beyond Monitoring platform at the ANDRA site in Bure
The Geoscope database, installed for the Data Acquisition and Management System (SAGD) of the ANDRA underground research laboratory of Bure (France), celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer.
The Geoscope database was created on Thursday June 13, 2002
The first acquisition point PPA0005_DFO_01 was created on June 26, 2002.
Today this database is still working and holds the world record of the largest Geoscope database with 9 billion values (9 228 800 000 values on the 20th anniversary).
The number of sensors is 30 000, and the database size is 1.34 Tb.
Geoscope / Beyond Monitoring is Sixense platform for management of monitoring data. Continuously developed and improved since 1997, it is used successfully on monitoring sites worldwide, from mega projects to small 10 sensors locations.
ANDRA is the French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management. The Bure laboratory is a network of horizontal underground galleries dug at a vertical depth of 500 m beneath the surface. It is used to evaluate the containment properties of the geological formation, in view of a potential future nuclear waste storage (CIGEO project).
The ANDRA Meuse/Haute-Marne research center in Bure (55)
The Bure Laboratory, or the Meuse/Haute-Marne Underground Research Laboratory, is a network of underground galleries located 500 m deep under the territory of the municipalities of Bure (Meuse) and Saudron (Haute-Marne) in France.
As part of research on the storage of radioactive waste in deep geological layers, this underground research laboratory is operated by the National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management (ANDRA) in order to assess the confinement properties of the geological formation located at a depth of 500 meters, in view of a potential future CIGEO nuclear waste storage project.
On the surface, a network of piezometric drillings and environmental monitoring stations record natural parameters.
Data Acquisition and Management System
The Underground Research Laboratory hosts several dozen types of mechanical, thermal, chemical, hydraulic, short and long term experiments, carried out by researchers from the laboratory but also various external French and foreign laboratories, and private companies selected through specific calls for tenders.
The measurements are therefore of all types, all frequencies, all formats.
Aware of the crucial nature of measured data, ANDRA issued a call for tenders in 1999 to design an instrumentation and monitoring database (which would today be called an instrumentation and monitoring platform), with the following priorities:
• Data security requirement, among the thousands of measurements carried out in the laboratory, none must ever be lost or modified, all the raw measurements must be kept and protected without any modification.
• Consequently, computer security requirement, secure and differentiated access, by research entity, by experimentation, by sensor.
• Requirement for processing power and ease of use and ergonomics, to help researchers extract the maximum information from the measured data.
• Requirement of durability over time, of permanent evolution to follow and survive changes in computer hardware.
Sixense Monitoring (then called Soldata) offered its existing Geoscope solution. Geoscope is the monitoring platform used by Sixense teams around the world for their own instrumentation and monitoring services. ANDRA’s requirements are guaranteed, among other things, by the fact that our teams have the same needs every day.
In 2022, in the continuity of the permanent evolution of its solution, Sixense launches the Beyond Monitoring platform, direct successor to Geoscope:
Geoscope database statistics (June 2022)
Database size: 1.34 TB
Size of a full database backup, after compression: 120 GB
Number of measurement points: 29,190
Number of values measured: 7,990,623,000
Number of values calculated: 1,238,177,000
Number of alarms: 2,627,587
Number of daily summary values: 53,038,329
Number of hourly summary values: 1,125,941,000
