The Ancestry “Magnetic Containment Field” meets Docker

Posted by Ancestry Team on August 19, 2015 in Agile, Development, DevOps, Distributed Computing

In the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the magnetic containment field prevents contact of antimatter with normal matter in a warp core. If the field were to collapse or fall below 15% of its maximum integrity, the starship would be destroyed. This containment field was a very important safety system for starships (reference Wikia). Read More

Monitoring progress of SOA HPC jobs programmatically

Posted by Ancestry Team on October 17, 2014 in C#, Development, Distributed Computing

Here at Ancestry.com, we currently use Microsoft’s High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster to do a variety of things.  My team has multiple things we use an HPC cluster for.  Interestingly enough, we don’t communicate with HPC exactly the same for any distinct job type.  We’re using the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model for two of Read More

Throttling Image Processing

Posted by Ancestry Team on June 21, 2013 in Distributed Computing, Image Processing and Analysis

Ancestry.com, like any other site with millions of subscribers, experiences predictable load patterns throughout the day. To maximize site performance and customer satisfaction, we make every effort to schedule maintenance during off-peak intervals. Content processing, especially our repository of hundreds of millions of images, on the other hand, is a constant ongoing effort, and in Read More