NASA Achieves Data Goals For Mars Rover With Open Source Software 35
caseyb89 writes "Open source projects Nginx, Railo CMS, and GlusterFS are powering Mars Curiosity's big data crunching. 'Taken together, the combination of cloud and open source enabled the Curiosity mission to provide beautiful images in real time, not months delayed; at high quality, not "good enough" quality. A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility.'"
This is all about the PR end of the system (Score:5, Informative)
This has nothing to do with processing the data from the rover (which comes in at rates a dial-up modem could handle). It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures.
NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.
Re:This is all about the PR end of the system (Score:5, Insightful)
Functions which are important to the project.
Re:This is all about the PR end of the system (Score:5, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with processing the data from the rover (which comes in at rates a dial-up modem could handle). It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures.
NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.
That is not quite true. The images that are seen are actually a mosaic of many images. The individual images are served up as a composite on demand from the servers. It is unlikely that NASA would have the time and resources to convert all of them so they could be displayed on Flickr and Youtube.
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How do they have the resources to do it on demand, multiple times, to serve it across the web... but not to do it once and upload them to Flickr?
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NASA could just upload the stills to Flickr and the videos to Youtube and save some money.
Great idea; I mean, what could possibly go wrong? [vice.com]
falseDMCA takedown blocked Curiosity lander stream (Score:1)
The copyright bots have tagged the NASA streams+videos (and possibly the NASA stills also, though I don't recall hearing about that happening) as being the copyright infringers even though NASA was the original producer of the content, the Scripps news service (which copied the NASA stream) was able to initiate and conclude an automated takedown of the NASA strea
And a perfect example, (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree. Any software designed or modified using public funds should be freely redistributed for any use by the public. No GPL, BSD.
Late-Breaking News from the Council: INFILTRATION! (Score:4, Funny)
K'Breel, speaker for the Council, spake thus.
"Integrating our semantic maps into the minds of the blueworlders has been a difficult task, but already their vocalization sequences have been reprogrammed to vocalize words unpronounceable in their language, but which are perfectly curlmenot in our fair tongue - words like like 'Nginx', 'Railocms', and 'Glusterfs.'"
When an agile young developer, fresh from a tour of duty infiltrating the blueworlders' breeding factories, suggested that a traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility, K'Breel recognized that the threat was bidirectional. (To defend against the threat, the Speaker, being in a particularly mercurial framework of mind, had the developer 's nodes gimped: the silly git's gelsacs were thrown into a blender, and the extracted fluid was disposed of by means of a waterfall.)
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All hail the Mighty K'Breel!
Coming soon to Slashdot . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Oh so that is why it's so cheap to do! (Score:2)
Actually I wish they got more funding so they could do a lot more.
AWS Seems like winner here (Score:5, Insightful)
AWS seems like the real key to the success here, not the use of open source software. While I think it's great that NASA took the open source route, I've read nothing to defend the position that this would not have been successful with non-open source software:
"A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility."
Even the article praises AWS more than the open source software mentioned, it's main source of content appears to come from the linked article [devopsangle.com] with information about the open source pieces of the stack added.
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AWS not so sucessfull? (Score:2)
Not so sucessfull, as compared to that socialist software written in someones bedroom
What is even more amazing... (Score:3)
What is even more amazing that the Curiosity Rover is that somehow Microsoft wasn't selected for a government project.
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This is NASA. You can get killed for choosing Microsoft (no, seriously)
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Railo -- not a CMS? (Score:2)
Symbolic irony (Score:2)
The irony in the article, is that the link for "high quality, not 'good enough' quality", leads to a page where the first image has around 20% of the data, missing/blacked out.
First time I've seen a definition of "high quality" that means "20% data loss"
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First time I've seen a definition of "high quality" that means "20% data loss"
The data isn't lost or blacked out. It's unprocessed. NASA releases images that are fully complete later on, and releases partial images immediately. Also, for an interplanetary mission to receive images as quickly as we are and even in various states of process is frankly amazing.
Open Source and Mars Rover (Score:3)
GlusterFS (Score:2)
GlusterFS is the most interesting piece of software here. It features elastic distributed and replicated storage, with full POSIX semantics (including locks), and no single point of failure (SPOF). An interesting point: it is coded in C, without nasty external dependencies (I mean that is no java bloatware)
This is very nice, but one question remains: that kind of software will give us cheap massive storage. How will be backup the data?