FusionIO IODrive OSM

I always run into people doing interesting work at LISAsoft - this one was startling enough I decided to share.

A bloke here on the hardware side of the street has hooked up a FusionIO IODrive to OSM.
What is that thing? Terabytes of virtual memory backed by happy little clustered NAND chips.

What happened?

• To pre-seed the top zoom-levels of OSM using mapnik are *close* to 50% quicker (based on tests done seeding a subset of the world).
• Lower zoom levels seem to be more CPU limited at this stage
• The IODrive should allow for many more concurrent parallel seeds to occur before we saturate IO

Yes this post has low open source content - but golly that is just so fast. And I don't want to think what one of those costs. Think we could enter it in the WMS shoot out - or is that like handing contestants a motorbike for a marathon.

Aside: This same hardware group was interested in donating hardware to an open street mapping party for FOSS4G but so far nobody returned their call? Can we make introductions or something?

Out in the World

I have managed to get out in the world a bit lately, as per this GeoServer blog entry. It was really interesting to catch up with the development team that has been doing so much excellent work on "application schemas". The game plan here is to enable geoserver to publish up data according to a strict format defined by a user community. In this case the event was even more interesting as there were real live users in attendance from LandGate, GeoScience Victoria and GeoScience Australia. It was really great to go over the issues with all those involved.



A little bit of team bonding.