Tracking Near-Earth Meteors With a 1.1 Petabyte Database

Lucas123 writes "The latest and most ambitious attempt to detect 'near-Earth objects' (NEOs) is the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS. When it's fully operational several years from now, it will have four telescopes, each with a 1.4-gigapixel camera. The system is expected to be able to track virtually all NEOs larger than 300 meters in diameter as well as many smaller ones. Rather than turning to an expensive supercomputer equipped with hundreds or thousands of processors, Pan-STARRS will use a cluster of 50 PC servers connected to 1.1 petabytes of disk storage via fast Infiniband networking gear."

Re:In case of Armageddon

[daveime]

I think I'd rather drill Liv Tyler than the meteor to be honest (although I'm sure my wife would disagree).

Individual boxen?

[kramulous]

The only advantage I can see of using 50 boxes for the computational and file serving would be that you could power cycle those that are not on demand. But if your recording terabytes of images and you're going to run some image processing/data analysis routines over them, would you be better off with a compute cluster such as a rack of Altix or Blue Gene? Easier to manage, lower administration, maintenance and ongoings? I also have to question Microsoft SQL Server. Storing and retrieving images sure, but when it comes to serving for analysis and storing/collating results, it would be a little too slow? How much can you tune a closed source solution on a tight budget as opposed going for one that you can tinker with to gain performance.

Re:This is so misguided

[TooMuchToDo]

Agreed. I've worked with an adult entertainment company (we host their sites) and shooting the shit the other day over a beer, they told me that they don't want to do stuff in HD because reality sets in (that even porn stars have average joe bodies up close).

Re:This is so misguided

[Al Al Cool J]

Doesn't have to be HD. Think massively widescreen orgy.

Re:So it can track those which cant be avoided ...

[js_sebastian]

So, it will be able to track those objects of such size or greater that would , unavoidably, sterilize our planet ... yet be unable to track those ( dia 300m ) whose paths we actually might be able to deflect ...

but it is a start and is to be applauded....

Who says we can't deflect a 1km object? The point is, you can't do it Armageddon-style at the last minute. But you can give it a small push in some direction 10 orbits (or 30 years) before it hits us. That's why orbit predictions need to be 50 years ahead.