We're a bunch of gadget-hounds here at Appistry, so when one of our favorite gadgets -- GeoEye-1 -- was written up by one of our favorite gadget blogs -- Gizmodo -- we were all pretty psyched.

With a price tag of over $500 million, GeoEye-1 defies the usual concept of a gadget. When Appistry customer GeoEye launches the next-generation satellite later this summer, GeoEye-1 will be the highest resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite in existence. From an orbit of 423 miles above the Earth, it will have a ground resolution of 0.41-meters, or about 16 inches, and will be able to collect some 700,000 sq. km. of imagery each day in panchromatic mode.

Launching a satellite with unprecedented image resolution has a number of important implications, not the least of which being the fact that a huge amount of compute power is required to process the resulting data.

In the past, companies presented with high-volume data processing challenges like this have been forced to make significant (seven-figure) investments in big iron, plus undertake complex development efforts in order to take full advantage of the SMP hardware. Instead, Appistry's products allowed GeoEye to deploy and run its existing image processing algorithms across a fabric of many off-the-shelf servers.

So we're happy to be one of the companies that helps to make a cool "gadget" like GeoEye-1 possible. Congratulations to GeoEye for all your success getting this amazing project so close to launch!

To learn more about Appistry's work with GeoEye, please check out the case study "Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric at GeoEye: Implementing a Next-Generation Platform for Geospatial Intelligence."