World record panoramic photo made possible with Fujitsu’s help

A recent blog post by Jeffery Martin on the London World Record Panoramic photo: http://blog.ts.fujitsu.com/face2fujitsu/?p=2479

Snippet from blog below:

Earlier this year, I had a chance to try to break my own record set last year, and to break the current record set in spring 2010 for “world’s largest photo” during a trip to the UK. While some people plan every aspect of such an event, I’m a bit more flexible – I had the necessary equipment needed to create the image, but it was doubtful that my own computer would be able to handle the creation of an image 5 times larger than my Prague Gigapixel (which itself was almost impossible to create using that computer). In fact, the necessary computing power to create this image properly is about 10x what I have – I simply couldn’t do it by myself. Anyway, I knew that this would be solved with time, and I was in no hurry to finish the image – it would suffice to do the photography, and the rest would eventually fall into place, I hoped.

So I was thrilled to speak to Marcus Hartmann of Fujitsu, who is also an enthusiast of photography, especially panoramic photography. I learned that a cooperation would be possible between Fujitsu and my company, 360cities.net — in short, Marcus would be able to provide me with a world-record-sized computer so that I could create this world-record-sized panoramic image!

After a couple of weeks, I made the trip from Prague, Czech Republic to Augsburg, Germany, to the headquarters of Fujitsu. Marcus generously procured from me the very best and fastest version of Fujitsu’s Celsius workstation – a stupendous 192 gigabytes of RAM, and 2 processors with 6 cores each. To put that in perspective, most geeks in your neighborhood, in 2010, will be bragging about having 16 gigabytes of RAM, and 4 or 8 cores. This computer has what is currently the maximum amount of RAM that can be put into a normal Windows PC, and will probably stay that way for another two or three years (it uses 12 dimms that are 16GB each, and you can’t buy dimms that are larger than 16GB, yet)

Please also see blog post by Marcus Hartmann: http://blog.ts.fujitsu.com/face2fujitsu/?p=2477