Queueing Aspects of Integrated Information and Computing Systems in Geosciences and Natural Sciences - Advances in Data, Methods, Models and Their Applications in Geoscience - page 1

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Queueing Aspects of Integrated Information
and Computing Systems in Geosciences
and Natural Sciences

Claus-Peter Rückemann
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU),
Leibniz Universität Hannover,
North-German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN)
Germany

1. Introduction

Modern geosciences widely rely on information science technologies. In most cases
of scientific research applications, tools, and state of the art hardware architectures are
infamously neglected and therefore their development is not pressed ahead and not
documented, a fault for continuous and future developments. Information Systems and
Computing Systems up to now live an isolated life, rarely integrated and mostly lacking
essential features for future application. Although in general technology advances and
new tools arise, there is a number of aspects that prevent interest groups from building
complex integrated systems and components on a long term base. These issues, from
hardware and system architecture aspects to software, legal, and collaborational aspects, are
top in the queue for realisation show-stoppers. This chapter presents the current status of
integrated information and computing systems. It discusses the most prominent technical
and legal aspects for applications in geosciences and natural sciences. Todays state of the art
information systems provide a plethora of features for nearly any field of application. Present
computing systems can provide various distributed and high end compute power. Compute
resources in most cases have to be supported by highly performing storage resources. The
most prominent disciplines on up to date resources are natural sciences like geosciences,
geophysics, physics, and many other fields with theoretical and applied usage scenarios. For
geosciences both information systems as well as computing resources are essential means of
day to day work. The most immanent limitation is that there are only a very few facilities with
these systems combining the information systems features with powerful compute resources.
The goal we have to work on for the next years is to facilitate this integration of information
and computing systems. Modern information systems can provide various information and
visualise context for different purposes beyond standard Geoscientific Information Systems
(GIS). Fields demanding for handling, processing, and analysing geoscientific data are
manyfold. Geophysics as well as applied sciences provide various methods as to name
magnetic methods, gravitymethods, seismic methods, tomography, electromagnetic methods,
resistivity methods, induced polarisation, radioactivity methods, well logging and various