The Bentely snowflake example

Wilson Bentley was a pioneer scientific imager. Starting in 1885, he started photographing close up pictures of snowflakes, eventually published a book containing over 2,500 photographs, which create the popular idea that "no two snowflakes are alike".

For this exercise, you will download and process the images published by bentley. There are 1000 of these, located on the web at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~gthain/bentley/0001.gif

through

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~gthain/bentley/1000.gif

You might want to look at these URLs by hand. Your task is to run an image sharpening program on each of these images, and report the file size of each one before and after. This should be done in a reasonably efficient manner, but in a way that can be reproducible by anyone following in your footsteps.

Programmatically, each file may be downloaded with the curl command like so:

curl http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~gthain/bentley/0001.gif > 0001.gif

The transform we would like can be performed by the "convert" command which is located in ~gthain/convert on osg-ss-submit like so:

OMP_THREAD_LIMIT=1 convert 1.gif -unsharp 0x1000 1_us.gif

Note that convert is not installed on any of the execute machines.

The final output should be a report of the sizes for each of the original execute files and their unsharpened relatives. There is more than one way to break up this work, so we'd also like to be able to discuss the design decisions you've made along the way.