Camera Cleaning

Eric and Paul snorkeled on the cameras today for a quick cleaning of the view ports. The ports SPC2 were very fouled and took numerous free dives to clean all of the barnacle and algal growth off. The SPCP2 was in better shape but still required quite a bit if cleaning. The housings, cables and frame are covered in growth and will require a cleaning dive soon.

Ceratium Bloom

We seem to be in the midst of a bloom of Ceratium. Below is a mosaic of all the ceratium (plus a few others) found in a 10 hour period

ceratium_bloom

Camera Cleaning

Paul and Eric did a quick snorkel today to clean the cameras. The ports were in reasonable shape with not too much barnacle growth.

Monthly Cleaning Dive

Today Mike and Paul dove on the cameras to do a general cleaning. There was good visibility and not much swell, but lots of growth to clean. We spent about 30 minutes cleaning. The housings and frame were covered with algal growth and many small barnacles. The viewports were the cleanest part overall, but they too had substantial algal growth and a few small barnacles.

Amphipods Again

Keeping with the theme of amphipods in the SPC2 camera, below is an example (again what looks to be a molt) that is very well focused showing excellent detail.

large_amphipod

Amphipods in the Month of May

Below is a collection of images from the SPC2 camera taken during the month of May 2015. These appear to be mostly molts from some kind of amphipod with a body length of 3-5 mm and are seen very rarely in the camera. Only 17 ROIs detected out of the over 20 million frames processed by the camera in 30 days.

A look inside spc.ucsd.edu

We recently upgraded some of the hard drives and network card in the server that stores the over 40 million rois from the cameras and hosts this website. This is a standard build from System 76. Here are a few images of what is inside the server

IMG 20150512 102655
A full set of 8 drives in two, RAID 10 configurations giving a total of 20 TB of redundant storage with 2x access times.
IMG 20150512 102643
The 64 GB of RAM and dual, 8-core CPUs
IMG 20150512 102631
The server chassis showing the cooling fans, motherboard, PCI slots, drive bays, and redundant power supplies

Cleaning Dive

Eric and Paul spent about 1 hour diving to clean the cameras and replace the intake filters on the port jet pumps today. There was tons of growth and a moderate swell to make for an entertaining dive. Below is a video taken after the cameras were cleaned