Scientists Built the 'Hubble Telescope For the Ocean' Using the Cloud

New submitter stacey7165 writes "VMware shared the application architecture story of how they worked with the Ocean Observatory Initiative to build a 'Hubble Telescope' of the ocean. It's comprised of a massive network of global, regional, and coastal sensors that send information to a common framework called the Common Operating Infrastructure (COI). The COI resides in a hybrid cloud powered by VMware and Amazon. To cope with a total of 49 classes and over 700 instruments deployed off of 6 coastlines, and a variety of consumption use cases, the Ocean Observatory Initiative built out the system using a variety of sub-systems loosely coupled through a messaging system powered by RabbitMQ called an 'Exchange.' Organized into a system where message clients pubsub from 'Exchange Points' and 'Exchange Spaces', the system is easier to maintain, extend, and scale. According to the OOI's documentation on release 1, the Integrated Observatory Network uses AMQP 0.9.1 and RabbitMQ-Server v. 2.3.1 on CentOS 5.5."

*700* instruments off *6* different coastlines?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't even IMAGINE that kind of scale. It's almost humanly impossible to conceive of handling that much data input with a mere computational device. Why, it must take an army of bright young men just to replace vacuum tubes in such a beast each day! Truly a miracle of American technology, know-how, and gumption! Let us see the Bolshevik match THAT!

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[Charliemopps]

Dude...
They said Hubble, Cloud, application Architecture and COI in the same paragraph. Drop your pants and suck VMwares dick immediately. They have buzz-worded you into submission.

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[jsh1972]

in Soviet Russia, ocean watch YOU!

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[Kennric]

8 terabytes per day, according to TFA. Add the ability to effectively query, slice, dice and present that much data on a long-term basis... yeah, that's a hell of a lot of vacuum tubes.

For comparison, the LHC does upwards of 27TB/day[1], Hubble 3-5[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LHC_Computing_Grid [wikipedia.org]
[2] http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope//hubble_essentials/ [hubblesite.org]

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[khallow]

Well, looking at the actual instruments, things like hydrophones, pressure sensors, broadband seismometers, and such, what instruments actual generate that bandwidth? I just don't see it. Seems to me that they're at least a couple of orders of magnitude off.

bait, hook and sinker

[bmimatt]

Hopefully, as scientists, they know that their 'cloud' is only as resilient as the underlying hardware, regardless of number of OS instances running on it. 

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[camg188]

Furthermore, Mediafire (referenced in earlier /. stories) is not "the cloud", it's a file hosting web site.

And while I feel a rant brewing, router manufacturers need to stop using "5G" to describe wireless network speeds.

Cool specs, but hubble?

[vlm]

Cool specs, but the real entertainment is trying to figure out how its like the :

'Hubble Telescope'

Do they mean the equations to design it were wrong and not tested to save money?

Or they mean the transport machine that installs and services it has been decommissioned?

It makes pictures?

Its gyros burn out on a regular basis (disclaimer, I've not been tracking this for years)

Ah they must mean its just one machine a single observational instrument. Oh that contradicts the whole rest of the write up.

Um... its a 1980s hardware design?

Oh no wait I know, it costs a billion dollars each time it's serviced, whereas it would only cost a quarter that to build another and launch it on a non-reusable booster. Yeah that must be it.

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[gl4ss]

I think they mean "it generates data that can be used to generate pretty grand scale pictures" portion of hubble. ..is it actually hosted on the cloud and uses multiple machines though?

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[Sigg3.net]

Well, it floats... so it sort of hubbles along the surface...

Ehh..

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[Desler]

What copyright? 'Exchange' itself is not even a Microsoft trademark.

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[lister king of smeg]

exactly my first thought, it looked like a bunch of corporate buzzwords and clickbait. Did a actual person write this or a HR/marketing troll?

Why was the cloud called into action for this?

[ickleberry]

Because they can, the CEO's (Internets, serious business! lads) love it and it's the fashionable thing to do.

Not because the aging Dell in a forgotten corner of the office is perfectly capable of handling the input from 700 measily sensors. For only $xx.99/mo you can cloudify it, CEO's will be 500% more impressed than if you pointed to a Dell in the forgotten corner because the cloud is so abstract, so future, so new and some annoying sales grunt from a cloud provider with a nasally American accent alre

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[c0lo]

For only $xx.99/mo you can cloudify it, CEO's will be 500% more impressed than if you pointed to a Dell in the forgotten corner because the cloud is so abstract, so future, so new and ...

What if somebody trips on the power cord [xkcd.com]?

Do words mean anything any more?

[__aaltlg1547]

VMware shared the application architecture story of how they worked with the Ocean Observatory Initiative to build a 'Hubble Telescope' of the ocean.

Apparently you can build telescopes out of software now. No need for expensive optics.

It's comprised of a massive network of global, regional, and coastal sensors that send information to a common framework called the Common Operating Infrastructure (COI).

No it's not. It might comprise that though, but it's still not a telescope.

Hubble?

[Nethemas the Great]

I know VMware is well known for the vacuous and unintelligible products of its marketing department but this one really has to take the cake. How does this software/hardware deployment even remotely resemble the Hubble space telescope? How can this "cotton candy" style marketing actually be effective? Who could possible be willing to waste their time consuming such a large puffball of words for a few grains of substance? And again, how the hell does this resemble the Hubble space telescope?