Slight OT: NASA World Wind project looking for support from network operators.

Matt Mills nanog at ceteranet.com
Sun Jun 5 05:25:30 UTC 2005


http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov

World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth.
Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission
data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just
as if you were really there.

Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the
Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.


A few example images:
http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Image:Bluemarble.jpg
http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Image:Srtm.jpg

Or you can check some hotspots:
http://www.worldwindcentral.com/hotspots/index.php?cat=top


The reason I'm posting to this list, is that the project is currently in a
bit of a bind. World wind is becoming so popular, that the small community
of developers and regular users can no longer afford to sustain the ammount
of bandwidth neccessary to deliver all of the satellite data to the client.
We're also having bandwidth issues in being able to actually distribute the
client software, due to the fact that it is around 188 MB. It is currently
the 6th most popular project on sourceforge.net with almost a million
downloads in the last 2 months alone. Nasa can no longer host the
installation program on their network do to the immense bandwidth usage it
creates. 

What I am asking for is sponsors that are willing to host pieces of the
datasets on their network. 

1. We currently do not have enough capacity to put all the data we have
online and keep it there.
2. We'd also like to setup geographically diverse nodes to enable redunancy
and lessen latency.


If you are willing to help this project at all, please contact me. Just as a
note, a full copy one of the datasets is around 120 Gigabytes (Although
we're currently looking into placing partial datasets), and the only
community run server tops out (currently) right now at around 15 megabits
per second. NASA is also running a web cluster to serve satellite data that
is using around 50-75 mbps. 


Thanks in advance for your support,
Matt Mills, the World Wind Developers, and the WorldWindcentral.com Staff.




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