Seattle Seahawks fans—aka the 12th Man—rocked the world on Jan. 19.
University of Washington seismologists and a handful of hard-core fans know it because they were doing some extra special listening (thanks to some last-minute help from Windows Azure).
Researchers from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) have installed seismometers at Seattle's CenturyLink Field, home of the Super Bowl-bound National Football League's Seahawks. The seismometers measure seismic activity that results from fans cheering and stomping after big plays—affectionately dubbed "Beast Quakes" after an epic touchdown run that Marshawn "Beast Mode" Lynch ripped off during a 2011 playoff game. (That initial quake would have registered about a 2 on the Richter scale, according to PNSN.)
But PNSN seismologists ran into a problem on Jan. 12 when the playoffs got under way in Seattle. Interest in their real-time seismic monitoring Web app Fan-o-Meter soared, but the team's lone Linux server couldn't handle the increased traffic. Only a fraction of the fans who visited saw any real-time data, and the PNSN team had no choice but to turn off the live stream and call it a failure.
Nik Garkusha, a senior product manager on the Windows Azure team, saw an article that mentioned the site's struggles. So, he reached out and asked if he could examine their setup. Maybe Windows Azure could help them keep up with the growing interest from Seahawks fans excited about their team's playoff run.
PNSN was running an open-source solution, but agreed to give Windows Azure a shot. So Garkusha asked two of his friends in different groups at Microsoft to quickly pitch in to help scale up the Fan-o-Meter. The trio of Windows Azure open-source advocates—Jose Miguel Parrella, Cory Fowler and Garkusha—wasted no time, working all day on Jan. 17 and into the evening. They continued hacking away on a solution that night over Skype and into Jan. 18.
By the morning of Jan. 19, the day the Seahawks would host the San Francisco 49ers and Lynch would score his second earthquake-causing touchdown, they had a working app. They passed it off to one of the seismologists who was on a bus heading to the game. When he arrived, he embedded the Windows Azure-based app into the Fan-O-Meter site and waited for kickoff.
Garkusha sat in front of two screens as the game kicked off—a TV tuned to the game and a laptop with the Windows Azure portal showing the seismic data in real time.
Like the more than 2,700 fans who tuned into the Windows Azure-hosted seismograph stream, he saw the graph spike when Lynch scored a third-quarter touchdown that tied the game (because the television broadcast is delayed, he actually saw the spike on the seismograph before he saw fans react to the play on TV). The seismic reaction to Lynch's score more or less equaled his Beast Quake touchdown run from 2011. (Learn more about the seismic game statistics.) By the time the game ended, more than 40,000 people had visited the PNSN site.
Garkusha said that he was happy for an opportunity to tackle the cloud-based challenge and to help PNSN measure 12th Man shaking. He was even happier to showcase Windows Azure's strengths to a skeptical audience. "All three of us have different backgrounds and skill sets, but we're all passionate about Windows Azure and helping open source shine on our platform," he said.
The total cost of scaling Fan-o-Meter for the game was only $6, winning over a PNSN crew that gave Garkusha, Parrella and Fowler "mad props" for their help. "You have converted a few old-school Microsoft haters to rethink their bias," researcher Jon Connolly wrote in an email to Garkusha. "I can't thank you all enough for your time and effort."
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Jake Siegel
Microsoft News Center Staff