
Supercomputers will start building a 3D map of the world - jonbaer
https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2019/08/05/supercomputers-will-start-building-a-3-d-map-of-the-world/
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crazygringo
Serious question: what on earth have supercomputers got to do with this?

My impression is supercomputers exist mainly for incredibly intensive large-
scale simulation/calculation that can't be subdivided into parts -- e.g.
weather or nuclear explosion simulation.

3D map processing feels like the literal opposite of that -- trivially
parallelizable, with a much higher ratio of data/IO to calculation.

Are they running out of tasks for Blue Waters to do, or trying to find a high-
profile project to justify it politically or something? I really can't imagine
for the life of me why you wouldn't just run this in any enterprise-grade
cloud.

~~~
chmhsm
Creating a 3d model out of 2d images requires computer vision to extract
objects in the images and estimate their dimensions (including elevation).
This will most likely require implementing an end-to-end deep learning model
that's gonna need training, validation and test. Given the amount of data
it'll have to deal with (100ks to millions of images) it'll need to load (high
dimensional?) images in batch for them to get processed. This can still be
done arguably on aws or Azure (or or...) with TensorFlow and HPC, but two
things here, HPC bring a bit more overhead to the table, and a supercomputer
could do better since none of the current cloud service providers have
supercomputers that can compete especially in terms of cpu performance.

~~~
acollins1331
Theres no reason it needs a DL model. There's a lot of software that
calculates tie points and creates point clouds from pictures, which is what
they are almost certainly going to do here. DL to go from orthoimages to point
cloud, if it is a thing, is probably still in the feasibility steps.

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twelvechairs
There's already multiple global DEM data sources. It would be good to
understand how this is better and what the planned accuracy is. Its a very
light article

[edit]

Their referenced Arctic DEM gives a 2m resolution however on accuracy notes
'Without ground control points absolute accuracy is approximately 4 meters in
horizontal and vertical planes'.

This is much better than most global data (SRTM and ASTER both at 30m
resolution)

However it is not as high resolution as many existing free models for
individual parts of the globe. As an example here in Australia I can get free
1m resolution DEMs of cities with accuracy noted at "0.3m (95% Confidence
Interval) vertical and 0.8m (95% Confidence Interval) horizontal".

~~~
samirm
>As an example here in Australia I can get free 1m resolution DEMs of cities

source please?

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twelvechairs
[https://elevation.fsdf.org.au/](https://elevation.fsdf.org.au/)

~~~
samirm
Thank you! :)

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blackbrokkoli
The article misses the point a bit. There are 3D maps of the world, or rather,
you can make your own on a weekend. Topographic data is out there for most
things, the problem is just it's very inconsistent and of course, resolution.
And I guess for the whole world you do need a decent computer.

To prove my point, here is some art I made [1] from open data (I think NASA)
with Blender and QGIS, meaning free software stack on very much a normal
computer. My model was the state Schleswig Holstein, a german county, but as
said, you can find data for pretty much everything. The resolution is not
astonishing, but enough to spot Germany's only high sea island, the
"Wattenmeer" where tide causes some spots to lie below water level on average,
the mouth of the Elbe and more cool stuff when you know where to look.

My point isn't to downplay the effort of EarthDEM, I just want to make more
people aware of what is already very much out there :)

[1]: [https://imgur.com/a/rZUTajX](https://imgur.com/a/rZUTajX)

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rurban
> And I guess for the whole world you do need a decent computer.

Nope, resolution is the problem, not scale. You need low orbit stereo photos,
like from an airplane. Without clouds. With satellite you only get 30m, with
airplanes you get under 1m. Cities usually rent a plane a year to adjust their
maps. Countries don't, they usually just rely on the cheap satellite photos.

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theseadroid
I wish every game depicting the real world contribute to a common 3D world
repository. And maybe allow crowd sourcing that repository too. Imagine what
we would get to play in flight simulators or driving simulators with such a
repository.

~~~
big_chungus
And imagine when some internet forum decides to put a phallic object on top of
some significant building, and all go vote it as legitimate. I'm not claiming
it's impossible, but there will certainly be obstacles (see wikipedia). This
has to be one data-set we get right; with self-driving cars coming, it could
cause injury or death if we don't.

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melling
Like you said: See Wikipedia.

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big_chungus
Right, but Wikipedia still has lots of issues with vandalism. They do a good
job, but it's just not accurate to keep something perfect at that scale.
Here's the difference: wikipedia gets vandalized and people laugh. Mapping
data gets vandalized and people could die.

~~~
melling
The world is a dynamic place. People and AI need to be able to reconcile when
what they see doesn’t match a map.

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jcfrei
A very valuable effort. Global mapping data should eventually enter the public
domain.

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dekhn
Supercomputers are exactly the wrong sort of tool to use for this- nearly
every supercomputer has crappy disk IO and tons of fast CPU and RAM and
network. Using a supercomputer for this would leave the expensive elements
like the GPUs nearly idle, and the IO subsystem would be the bottleneck.

~~~
godelski
I'm confused by this comment, especially since you seem to work with super
computers. One of the biggest challenges in ECP (exascale computing project)
is disk IO. So much so that they were inventing complicated heterogeneous
architectures. In fact many teams are just skipping disk all together and
using in situ methods, only saving results. I would think that would be needed
here.

But the question is what heavy processing computer doesn't have IO issues?
Also, Blue Waters isn't really a GPU super computer like Summit and Sierra are
(or the up coming Aurora and Frontier). It has 4228 nodes (out of ~27000
nodes) that have GPUs on them, and they only have one, and they are Keplers.
Those aren't great GPUs and aren't going to do very well in parallel either.
There's a big bottleneck in GPU IO. I think this program will not be utilizing
GPUs very heavily. Worse, they don't have many CPUs per node. It's 8-16 cores
and 32-64 GB memory per node. There's going to be a lot of time spent in
communication.

I'll admit that BW doesn't seem like the best computer to the job, but you use
what you got. I'll buy the argument that this is the wrong computer for the
specific job, but what would you use besides a super computer? (I think Summit
would be a good computer for this job)

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andyljones
Someone in the know - why do you need a supercomputer for this? From an
amateur position it seems suitable for commodity compute and a big ol map-
reduce.

Getting chunk edges to align might be tricky, but the usual solution to that
is to stagger the chunks and throw away the edges.

~~~
0xffff2
There's not really a huge difference between supercomputers and a large number
of ordinary computers these days. The computational hardware is basically the
same. Only the communication interconnects are different.

I strongly suspect that they don't need a supercomputer, but they had one
available and it sounds cool. I sit one building over from the ~13th largest
supercomputer in the world and I've definitely used it when I needed a bit
more computing power than my laptop could provide. I used the supercomputer
because I could, not because I needed to.

~~~
dekhn
Did you have an embarassingly parallel code (like, "map"), or a code that was
ported to supercomputers?

I've worked on supercomputers for years and generally, one could not run code
at scale unless it scaled- in terms of parallel performance- and also used the
network in a non-trivial way. Supercomputers aren't just speedups for normal
codes (I'm pretty sure you know this).

The real issue with modern supercomputers is that basically none of them have
decent disk IO. That's what differs between modern Internet/cloud clusters and
supercomputers. Cloud clusters emphasize very high connectivity between
durable storage and worker nodes. None of the supercomputers have a decent
disk IO stack (mostly GPFS and Lustre) and this ends up being no end of pain
for applicaiton developers. The only recent improvement in this area was
"burst buffers", but that's really just accelerated data staging.

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ungzd
Article title is misleading. It's not "3D map", like city map with 3D
buildings or something like that, it's just a DEM, digital elevation model.
It's not a map at all.

It's useful for addition information to build a map, but it's not a map.

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maxemitchell
I found a much better source regarding this in the form of a November 2018
white paper[1]. Interesting is that they say it will take 3.2-3.5 years of
Blue Waters computing time.

[1]:
[https://www.exascale.org/bdec/sites/www.exascale.org.bdec/fi...](https://www.exascale.org/bdec/sites/www.exascale.org.bdec/files/whitepapers/Kramer_BDEC2__WP_v2.pdf)

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frankharv
When I was in port in Gitmo in 1987 there was a civilian boat in harbor with a
large tethered balloon. They were mapping Cuba for the US Defense Mapping
Agency(DMA).

So I would guess that DMA had a 3D terrain map around 1989. I know it was used
for cruise missile flight planning. No idea what the resolution was.

Even with our very detailed underwater mapping the Navy still has areas that
are not well covered.

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-
ships/a24158/...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-
ships/a24158/uss-san-francisco-mountain-incident/)

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mnutsch23
This has already been a thing for at least a year.

For example: Go to Google Maps, satellite view. Then zoom in and rotate with
Ctrl + click & drag.
[https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7644941,-96.8061872,1158a,35...](https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7644941,-96.8061872,1158a,35y,11.78h,55.61t/data=!3m1!1e3)

Microsoft and Mapbox also have an experimental project where computer vision
on cars maps the location of recognized objects. This is probably true of
every company researching self-driving cars.

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llsf
I am wondering what resolution they work with. Because earth crust is moving
continuously, and sometimes suddenly like 6 feet at once:
[https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-22/ridgecre...](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-22/ridgecrest-
earthquake-images-broken-ground) I like the idea to survey the whole planet, I
would be curious to see what resolution they end up with, and how often it is
updated.

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sorenjan
It's a bit strange that they use DigitalGlobe imagery, since DigitalGlobe owns
50% of Vricon who use aerial and satellite photos to make 3D maps. Their
tagline is "The globe in 3D".

[https://www.vricon.com/news/saab-digitalglobe-announce-
vrico...](https://www.vricon.com/news/saab-digitalglobe-announce-vricon-joint-
venture-create-globe-3d/)

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pbhjpbhj
The Arctic 3D map mentioned in OP,
[https://livingatlas2.arcgis.com/arcticdemexplorer/](https://livingatlas2.arcgis.com/arcticdemexplorer/)
\-- covers the whole area from 60deg N.

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rurban
Marketing: "With EarthDEM, we will take this transformative new capability to
where most of us live, to cities and coastlines, that will directly impact
their lives."

Tech: We need these maps for our cruise missiles.

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csteubs
Another step in the right direction, but satellites will continue to be the
bottleneck to unlocking the full value of maps.

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gourou
Is there currently a way to get the elevation of a point? I know Google Earth
has one but it's very imprecise

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namirez
Here is one option: [https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-elevation-
data?qt-...](https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-elevation-data?qt-
news_science_products=7#qt-news_science_products)

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dzdt
This public effort is still way behind private efforts like google earth, it
seems.

~~~
black_puppydog
You say that like it's written in the article but I don't see it. And even if
(!) the quality of the map were slightly below google maps, having it freely
available would be a huge plus nevertheless.

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mceoin
This is very exciting. One step closer to a manual for spaceship earth.

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mjparrott
How is this different than Google Earth / Maps?

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gao8a
The silent cartographer

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paparush
Paging Hiro Protagonist

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mlwhiz
Don't they already have the map of the world in 3D?

