100 Million Images Processed and Counting
Fremont, Calif. and Berkeley, Calif. – August 9, 2011 – Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing (HPC) solutions and earthmine, a world leader in 3D street-level imagery, announced today that 100 million images have been processed using Penguin Computing on Demand (POD), the company’s public HPC cloud offering.
Following the vision of ‘indexing reality,’ earthmine offers mobile 3D mapping technology and content to customers around the globe. earthmine images contain 3D point information for every pixel, allowing users to extract accurate spatial measurements of objects’ physical dimensions. earthmine offers image collection hardware, image content and visualization software, as well as collection services through its worldwide partner network. The list of earthmine customers includes municipalities and counties across the country, such as the cities of San Diego and Oakland, which are using earthmine imagery for asset management purposes. PagesJaunes, the French Yellow Pages, is currently offering an immersive local search experience that includes earthmine image captures of the 200 largest cities in France.
“During the first years of our operation we ran our image processing pipeline on a mid-size HPC cluster from Penguin Computing,” said John Ristevski, co-CEO and founder of earthmine. “As customer demand increased, we realized that we were reaching the capacity limit of our cluster and also that it was not cost effective to scale out our existing hardware to handle the peak demands in processing. We are now running our entire workload on POD, processing up to 50,000 jobs per day. The quick turnaround of this workload is business critical for us. POD provides the scalability and elasticity we need when workload peaks occur. POD has been easy to access and extremely reliable, and Penguin is continuing to help us optimize our throughput on POD.”
POD is currently the only public HPC cloud that supports ‘bare metal’ execution of compute jobs, free of the overhead introduced by virtualization layers. POD effectively provides public access to a supercomputer to users that require compute capacity that is unavailable in-house. On POD, users can decide for every compute job which resources are required for optimal job execution, and are only charged for compute time used.
“Penguin Computing and earthmine have a long standing relationship and we are proud that POD is helping earthmine bring its next generation mapping solutions to an increasing number of customers. earthmine’s business case is just one example where the POD public HPC cloud is a perfect fit for organizations with limited IT resources that need to address project-driven workloads, which are expensive or impossible to accommodate in-house,” says Tom Coull, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Software and Services at Penguin Computing.
About Penguin Computing
Penguin Computing is a global leader in high-performance computing (HPC), delivering complete, integrated HPC solutions, from the workstation to the cloud. With a focus on cutting-edge technology, ease-of-use and exceptional customer service, Penguin cost-effectively meets the needs of the world’s most demanding HPC users, including Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Navy. Today, Penguin delivers a range of solutions, from massive Linux clusters to cluster management solutions based on Penguin’s Scyld ClusterWare to “Penguin Computing on Demand” (POD), a new service that provides a complete HPC cloud solution. Penguin has been an innovator in HPC solutions for over a decade. For more information about Penguin Computing and Penguin products please go to www.penguincomputing.com.
About earthmine
earthmine’s mobile 3D mapping solution consists of vehicle-based mobile mapping systems, automated data processing, online hosting services or end-user hosted options, as well as developer tools for integration with existing data sets and information systems. earthmine Partners provide market and customer specific solutions that include earthmine’s solution, as well as other value added products and services. earthmine technology is used by internet, mobile, mapping, GIS, safety, and security markets worldwide in the United States, Mexico, Canada, France and Australia, as well as other countries around the world. Find earthmine on the web at www.earthmine.com or follow earthmine on Twitter at http://twitter.com/earthmine.