LatConnect 60 Pty Ltd, an Australian smart satellite provider, has entered into an agreement with high-performance computing (HPC) specialists DUG Technology (DUG). This partnership will allow LatConnect 60 to provide high-resolution Earth observation analytics services at scale to government and commercial clients in the agriculture sector.
LatConnect 60 is commercialising its Plantation Analytics Reporting Service (PARS), catered to the agriculture sector. PARS utilises large amounts of multispectral and hyperspectral satellite imagery data to generate vegetation indices—a key tool used in precision agriculture to provide crucial insights into the profiles of plantations, which are then applied to enhance crop management. LatConnect 60 will leverage DUG’s expertise in providing reliable cloud-based HPC via DUG McCloud, ensuring state-of-the-art compute resources are accessible to support and deploy subscription-based agriculture monitoring solutions to tens of thousands of potential subscribers across Malaysia, followed by the region.
The inflexibility of other cloud providers was preventing LatConnect 60 from running their data-processing workflows efficiently. The increase in time and associated costs made the process unsustainable for a large-scale deployment of their monitoring technology. A tailored, cost-effective and efficient solution was required.
DUG completed a proof of concept involving terabytes of historical satellite imagery data provided by LatConnect 60. With DUG’s bespoke professional services, such as code onboarding and optimisation, the imagery data was migrated to DUG’s HPC environment and analyses were completed within hours. Previously, such results would have taken weeks to generate. DUG’s cloud-based HPC as a service offers users a complete stack, which includes trimmings typically unavailable in public or private clouds—high-speed networks with low latency, innovative solid-state-drive-based storage systems, expert support and measures of data sovereignty—all configured to provide the highest level of performance required to support LatConnect 60’s industry-leading services.
CEO of LatConnect 60 Venkat Pillay welcomed this partnership saying: “The team and I at LatConnect 60 have been thoroughly impressed by the speed and scale at which DUG’s HPC offering has been able to support our agriculture analytics services. Data-processing tasks which took us weeks in the past can now be completed in a few hours. This is a game-changing development for us.”
Commenting on the agreement, DUG Managing Director Dr Matthew Lamont said: “We are very excited about our partnership with LatConnect 60 and we look forward to working with them to equip the agriculture sector with advanced big-data solutions. One of the key strengths of our HPC offering is the technical support that we can provide, allowing our users to concentrate on their work without sweating the IT complexities.”
Full media release here.
