Microsoft Research World Wide Telescope

WWT History

1997 – Jim Gray’s TerraServer (now Microsoft Research Maps)http://

research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=69651

2002 - The World-Wide Telescope, an Archetype for Online Science Jim Gray, Microsoft Research Alex Szalay, Johns Hopkins University

2003 – SkyServer DR1http://cas.sdss.org/dr7/en/

2007 – World Wide Telescope project presented at TechFest

2010 – Terapixel projecthttp://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/terapixel/

2011 – Layerscape

Image pyramids

Terapixel project: Palomar obsevatory

Terapixel project: UK Schmidt Telescope

Equirectangular projection

Image source: http://drdave.co.uk/blog

Tessellated Octahedral Adaptive Subdivision Transform

Image source: http://drdave.co.uk/blog

TOAST tiles

Terapixel project: numbersRaw data: • 1791 pairs of red-light and blue-light images acquired from two

telescopes, scanned into 23,040x23,040 or 14000x14000 images. Windows HPC Cluster: • The high-performance computational platform used to run Terapixel,

consisting of 64 compute nodes, each a quad-core Intel Xeon CPU with 16 GB RAM and 1.7 TB of storage.

Generation of RGB plates • Processing time: 5 hrs. Input: 417 GB (compressed, 4TB

uncompressed) • Output: 790 GB (approx. 500MB/plate)

Stitch images into a spherical image • Processing time: 3 hours

Optimize image to remove seams • Processing time: 4 hours 15 minutes

Terapixel project: technologies

• Windows HPC cluster

• Trident scientific workflow

• DryadLINQ

Terapixel project: results