Over the years, Tom acquired many, many images of the sky with the Mark IV cameras. He saved many of them in "clean" form (after dark subtraction and flatfielding) and wrote them onto hundreds of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. I would like to make at least part of this large dataset available to interested parties in a convenient manner.
The size of each image is about 8 MBytes, and there are something like 400,000 images on all the optical disks. That means that the total data volume is around 3 Terabytes. In order to keep all this information spinning and available at all times, one needs a LOT of hard drive space. Fortunately, hard drive capacities keep going up, and in the past year, it has become feasible to store all this information on a relatively inexpensive desktop computer.
After talking over the problem with one of the IT people here at RIT, I took a deep breath and ordered a set of parts from an on-line retailer. When the stuff arrived in June, I had to put it all together. This little document simply shows some of the steps involved and describes briefly the final result.
The system is built around a motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU.
If you really want to see all the details on the hardware, look at this wish listHowever, the motherboard and the CPU were shipped separately, as you can see from the picture below: there is no chip in the slot just to the right of the "Gigabyte" label.
So, I carefully unwrapped the CPU and mounted it onto the motherboard. This processor runs so hot that it requires a heatsink with fan to be mounted on top of it. This was my first experience with thermal glue:
Here's a view of the motherboard after CPU and heatsink were in place:
Next, I had to place the motherboard into the computer case and connect all the wires: some for LEDs, some for fans, some for buttons. Then I had to insert all the hard drives: there are six hard drives, mounted in the locations marked by arrows in the picture below (the picture was taken before I installed all of them):
One of the drives holds the operating system, and the other five are combined into a RAID-5 array. The array provides about 3.9 Terabytes of space with some redundancy. If any one of the five drives in the array should fail, all the information remains intact. I have a spare drive waiting to take the place of any drive which fails.
The case has a cool blue light which glows in the dark -- ooooh, waaahhh.
Of course, I bought a UPS to filter the power and provide about a half-hour of batter backup in case of a power failure.
Finally, I installed Ubuntu Linux 8.04 .
The machine is registered as banzai.rit.edu. I have installed the Apache HTTP server, but as you'll see if you visit the machine's URL, there isn't any content yet.
At the moment, I am slowly transferring the data from the CD-Rs and DVD-Rs onto the machine's hard drive. There is currently about 1 Terabyte in the RAID array, perhaps one-third of the total. The transfer process has slowed, since I started with the DVD-Rs and am now working on the much more numerous -- but much less capacious -- CD-Rs. One of the students working over the summer at RIT uses 10 machines in one of the computer labs to read 10 CD-Rs at a time, and transfer all the files from the CD-R to banzai over the campus network. It's slow, but steady.
My plan is to