Slashdot Mirror
NASA Achieves Data Goals For Mars Rover With Open Source Software
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 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.
...of precisely where open-source should be applied; NASA. I like to imagine such endeavors are not self-serving, but public, and for anyone with the will and ability, to either contribute, admire, or simply understand.
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.)
All hail the Mighty K'Breel!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"EFF files injunction against NASA for AGPL violations in Mars Rover firmware"
Oh so that is why it's so cheap to do!
Actually I wish they got more funding so they could do a lot more.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
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 with information about the open source pieces of the stack added.
What is even more amazing that the Curiosity Rover is that somehow Microsoft wasn't selected for a government project.
I believe that Railo is a scripting language, not a CMS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railo
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"
Entities like E. W. Scripps Company have specialized in cloud-piracy. What they do is launch fraudulent DCMA claims and they either take down videos, or they strap ads on them to make money. So, they can monetize off other peoples work. What Scrips do is to take video from UStream that has no copyright on it, then they run it through Youtube content ID system and claim ownership over it. They are not the only ones who use this attack. Basically, they are getting ad-revenue off things that they have no valid copyright on. But, copyright legislation and control are based on the assumption that everything is copyrighted, and don't take into account that parts of the video might be creative commons or public domain. So, some of it's faulty algorithms, the rest is just companies claiming ownership over things they didn't make.
"Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a free, open source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy .. Railo is an open source content management system (CMS) .. GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system", link
AccountKiller
Most of the previous comments are why CmdrTaco walked away from slashdot. A total waste of electricity.
'AWS seems like the real key to the success here, not the use of open source software'
...
Not so sucessfull, as compared to that socialist software written in someones bedroom
AccountKiller
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?
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 stream by claiming copyright infringement.
.
The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming Video's Robotic Overlords
Similar inaccurate DMCA takedown notices have occurred in the past. Thus, the wisdom of hosting your own videos means that you are not the mercy/whim of idiots like Google and Flickr who willingly accept bot declarations of copyright infringement and takedown non-infringing original content submitted by the original creators of that content.