FusionIO IODrive OSM

I always run into people doing interesting work at LISAsoft - this one was startling enough I decided to share.

A bloke here on the hardware side of the street has hooked up a FusionIO IODrive to OSM.
What is that thing? Terabytes of virtual memory backed by happy little clustered NAND chips.

What happened?

• To pre-seed the top zoom-levels of OSM using mapnik are *close* to 50% quicker (based on tests done seeding a subset of the world).
• Lower zoom levels seem to be more CPU limited at this stage
• The IODrive should allow for many more concurrent parallel seeds to occur before we saturate IO

Yes this post has low open source content - but golly that is just so fast. And I don't want to think what one of those costs. Think we could enter it in the WMS shoot out - or is that like handing contestants a motorbike for a marathon.

Aside: This same hardware group was interested in donating hardware to an open street mapping party for FOSS4G but so far nobody returned their call? Can we make introductions or something?