Updates Improve OpenTopography Performance and Stability

As part of OpenTopography's ongoing efforts to provide quick and reliable access to lidar data and derived products (e.g., high-resolution DEMs), our latest system update (OT v. 3.1) features a number of improvements to the data access and processing system designed to improve performance and make OpenTopography more reliable under growing processing loads.

This update features a new, and significantly more powerful processing server for DEM and derived product generation. Tests indicate that processing is now 30-40% faster with this updated hardware. In addition, OpenTopography is now using the TORQUE resource manager to provide better load balancing and scalability when multiple concurrent large jobs are running on OpenTopography. These updates are timely as usage of OpenTopography has increased dramatically over the past several months.

The OpenTopography v. 3.1 release also includes a new administrative dashboard that allows data providers who have partnered with OpenTopography to view usage statistics for their data in real time. This feature has been requested by our partners and is another incentive to host data with OpenTopography. Finally, OT v. 3.1 includes bug fixes and other minor improvements.