Terabytes of Satellite Images with Perl

By Mark Overmeer (‎markov‎) from Arnhem.pm, Amsterdam.pm
Date: Thursday, 1 September 2005 14:30
Duration: 40 minutes
Language:

The "Satfoto" software is a web-based satellite image archiving system on
disk, targeted to replace CD, DVD and Tape archives in large companies
and organizations. It is built from a cluster of cheap PCs and fully
written in Perl.

The distributed nature of the application (a cluster of PCs) , the huge
size of the images (usually over 500MB each), and the limited (financial
and time) resources for development are a real challenge.

On the moment, the development cluster of PCs provides about 7 TeraByte
of storage on two physical locations. In total, over 35,000 scenes
(pictures) from various satellites are viewable within seconds.

The presentation will discuss some design decisions and their outcome.
It certainly pays off to avoid 'hype' thinking, trying to be efficient.
Many common practices are extremely inefficient, and can better be
avoided. When time, the system will be demonstrated in action.