Using Mac Pros to reprocess 40 year old lunar images

[SixStringGeek]

I figure most of you tech heads would enjoy this story. Reprocessing the data stored on ancient tapes of lunar scan imagery taken prior to the Apollo mission. It involves hunting down and refurbishing ancient tape decks and processing the original scan data with Mac Pros. It is all interesting but the snow leopard jaw dropper for me reads:

After capture, the images are processed with Adobe Photoshop and Igor Pro analysis software from WaveMetrics Inc. But the new plan is to move to a custom application written in C, largely because of its ability to take advantage of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). With Igor Pro and Photoshop, processing takes an hour for a high-resolution image and 20 minutes for a medium-resolution image. But after the switch to the C program, processing with the Snow Leopard version should be almost immediate, based on the testing that's been conducted

Snow is cool.

[twistedtom]

Is it snow or C or both? Very interesting.

[SixStringGeek]

Is it snow or C or both? Very interesting.

It is a combination of things. Photoshow and Igor are written in C, but they're written assuming a single processor in the old style (pre snow leopard). Most probably the new program uses the new snow leopard tricks and grand central dispatch to spread the image processing out into many 'tiles' processes each on a different processor, then reassembling them at the end.

We are using a tiny fraction of the power of our machines right now. Snow Leopard should change that for programs rewritten or restructured to take advantage of it.

[David Polich]

SixString, I finally figured it out - you're really Terry O'Quinn, the guy who plays John Locke
on "Lost"! Bainbridge Island - "the" island - it can't be mere coincidence...

[kgdrum]

I figure most of you tech heads would enjoy this story. Reprocessing the data stored on ancient tapes of lunar scan imagery taken prior to the Apollo mission. It involves hunting down and refurbishing ancient tape decks and processing the original scan data with Mac Pros. It is all interesting but the snow leopard jaw dropper for me reads:

After capture, the images are processed with Adobe Photoshop and Igor Pro analysis software from WaveMetrics Inc. But the new plan is to move to a custom application written in C, largely because of its ability to take advantage of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). With Igor Pro and Photoshop, processing takes an hour for a high-resolution image and 20 minutes for a medium-resolution image. But after the switch to the C program, processing with the Snow Leopard version should be almost immediate, based on the testing that's been conducted

Snow is cool.

WOW! Snow Leopard looks cool enough that I might actually want to upgrade my Mac to a newer Intel based Mac!

[johnnytucats]

They should work on some of the Kennedy assassination photos and find the second gunman.

[HCMarkus]

That might take a little longer, even under Snow Leopard, to resolve.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Maybe it was a gun woman!

[michkhol]

WOW! Snow Leopard looks cool enough that I might actually want to upgrade my Mac to a newer Intel based Mac!

Actually, to take advantage of the Grand Central Dispatch the programs have to be rewritten. We have yet to see the slew of freshly overhauled DAWs, plugins, etc. coming like tidal wave atop the Snow Leopard. And most likely there will be no backward compatibility with Leopard vulgaris.

[SixStringGeek]

WOW! Snow Leopard looks cool enough that I might actually want to upgrade my Mac to a newer Intel based Mac!

Actually, to take advantage of the Grand Central Dispatch the programs have to be rewritten. We have yet to see the slew of freshly overhauled DAWs, plugins, etc. coming like tidal wave atop the Snow Leopard. And most likely there will be no backward compatibility with Leopard vulgaris.

Not so much rewritten (which sounds like a lot of work and it is) as restructured or refactored - which has been shown to be not all that much work relative to what you get.

You are correct that once a program goes snow then it requires snow. Programs that desire to maintain backwards compatibility will have to be maintained in two versions for a little while.