Distributed Geographic Information Systems Project Concepts Discussion Document Draft

We discuss end-user applications and enabling technologies for Distributed Geographical Information Systems (DGIS) and review concepts for a Distributed High Performance Computing (DHPC) project for the development of a high performance DGIS. Archiving, access and processing of scientific data are discussed in the context of geographic and environmental applications with special emphasis on the potential for local-area weather, agriculture, soil and land management products. Software technologies such as tiling and caching techniques can be used to optimise storage requirements and response time for applications requiring very large data sets such as multi-channel satellite data. Distributed High Performance Computing hardware technology underpins our proposed system. In particular, we discuss the capabilities of a distributed hardware environment incorporating: high bandwidth communications networks such as Telstra's Experimental Broadband Network (EBN); large capacity hierarchical storage systems; and high performance parallel computing resources.