TECHNOLOGY - Big data providing new insights

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PIM Technology Trends: Viewpoint from Tristan Jones, regional marketing engineer, industrial & embedded systems, at National Instruments UK & Ireland:

In industrial monitoring and control applications, engineers and scientists can collect vast amounts of data in short periods of time to address reliability, availability, serviceability and manageability (RASM) of costly assets.

Large gas turbine manufacturers report that test data, from instrumented electricity generating turbines, generate over 10 terabytes of data per day.

In one asset monitoring application cited in the October 2013 Automation World article, “Big Data: Sweat the Little Stuff,” 152,000 sensor samples are taken every second, accumulating up to 4 trillion samples in a single year.

But the amount of data is not the only trait of big data.

In general, big data is characterised by a combination “Vs”—volume, variety, velocity and value. An additional “V,” visibility, is emerging as a key defining characteristic. That is, a growing need among global corporations for geographically dispersed access to business, engineering and scientific data.

For example, process engineers at plants in South America and China may need access to each other’s data to conduct comparative analysis. This results in demand for network and cloud-based IT systems, to be closely coupled to DAQ systems.

Specifically, engineers are looking at three-tier architectures, as depicted in the figure below, to create a single, integrated solution that adds insight from the real-time capture at the sensors to the analytics at the back-end IT infrastructures.

The data flow starts in tier 1 at the sensor and is captured in tier 2 system nodes. These nodes perform the initial real-time, in-motion, and early-life data analysis. In the tier 3 IT infrastructure, servers, storage and networking equipment manage, organise and further analyse the early-life or at-rest data.

Through the stages of data flow, the growing field of big data analytics is generating never-before-seen engineering and business insights and solving problems in key application areas such as machine condition asset monitoring.

For more information about Big Analog Data solutions visit ni.com/biganalogdata and more top technology trends at ni.com/trendwatch (external websites).