A Landsat scene can be retrieved to any workstation in the network in a few minutes. The tape silo also backs up many workstations, including some outside the project. 300 Gb of system backups written in a weekend is typical. Thus the Cray can be under very high and simultaneous compute and file serving demands for weeks on end. The usage, optimisation and configuration of this high performance technology mix is leading edge at both the national and international level.
Uptime is critical.
The total coverage of the State of Queensland, combined with availability of multiple date imagery all registered and rectified to common points, and uniformly radiometrically processed and standardised to the same base, is also a new performance standard in the use of satellite imagery in natural resource management. Most of these procedures have now been automated and standardised into documented macros and scripts to minimise errors. A huge number of files are generated at the intermediate phases of the image processing process. Strict filenaming conventions are used and procedures have been written to track file usage to and from the tape library. Daily statewide maps of the stages of image processing for each scene are available on the local intranet and are used to monitor milestone performance.