Microsoft Research’s Terapixel Image

Microsoft has put their flag in the sand in a way that won’t soon be surpassed, with the release of their “Terapixel Image” project.  A spherical image of the sky, from the Digitized Sky Survey, they combined 1800 images on a 64-node cluster into a massive 802GB file one 1 Terapixel.

The result of the Terapixel project is a full color 24 bit RGB terapixel image of the night sky. The artifacts of the original telescope imaging process have been programmatically removed. The resulting image can be viewed in the WorldWide Telescope and by Bing Maps.TeraPixel is a showcase for Microsoft technologies in many-core computing, in high performance and data-intensive distributed computing, and in scientific workflow management.

A TeraPixel (that’s 1-Million MegaPixels) would require roughly a half-million HD Televisions.

via Terapixel – Microsoft Research.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .