DAS took delivery in early July 2005 of its second ADS40 purchased from Leica Geosystems. This now doubles the data collection capacity of DAS and provides the redundancy of having two ADS40 systems.
Production capacity has been increased in order to keep pace with the two ADS40's, and DAS has also purchased a state-of-the-art High Performance Distributed Computing Image Processing System (HPDCIPS) that enhances an already proven digital end to end production workflow solution.
The introduction of the High Performance Distributed Computing Image Processing System (HPDCIPS) to the production environment enables the technical staff to successfully manage the large datasets acquired by the two digital sensors.
After a successful collection, the data is brought back to the DAS production facility where it is downloaded directly to a Central Storage Repository, (CSR) and immediately entered into the digital production workflow.
In this new addition to the digital photogrammetric workflow, the key enabling technology of the High Performance Distributed Computing Image Processing System is that of Distributed Computing, the method of dividing large processing problems into smaller tasks that can run on individual systems.
The HPDCIPS takes the large dataset, which normally requires an enormous computational effort and evenly distributes the computations between the cluster of blade servers, and through software performs with the speed of a large mainframe computer.
Performance from this type of technology can be seen in the ground processing workflow of the ADS40 digital data. DAS utilizes a distributed computation design (6-nodes high-end integrated computing cluster architecture) for our processing solution built off of Leica's GPro software and integrated with advanced custom photogrammetric SOCET SET imagery production software routines This ties in with the ADS40 image rectification and automated point matching, which require heavy computer crunching.
Our High Performance Distributed Computing Image Processing System is built on a Fibre Storage Area Network (SAN) containing approximately 40 Terabytes of fibre storage utilizing HP Blade-Servers as nodes.
Overall benefits of DAS’s new High Performance Distributed Computing Image Processing System lead to time saved in the transition from imagery collection to the end product in the hands of the customer.
