Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
assisting and integrated methods and techniques. Integrating these methods with information
systems and the support of remote sensing, cartography, depth imaging, and infrastructural
and social sources a more and more holistic view on the earth system will be possible. This
will help to gain insight in the fields of seismology, meteorology, climatology, prospection
and exploration, medical geology, epidemiology, environmental planning and many more
disciplines. The resulting information systems and applications are not only used for scientific
research but for public information, education, disaster management, expert systems and
many more. In various application areas the surplus value arises with intelligent combination
of information. A cartographic system only displaying spatial data is of less significance
for a seismological disaster management application if there are no additional information
and features provided. Provisioning these information will in many case result in interactive
computation. For some use cases requests for points of interest, dynamical cartography, event
programming, flexible event triggering, long-term monitoring like in seismology, catastrophe
management and meteorology are necessary, for others simulation or modeling of scenarios
are essential. All these fields of application contain tasks that cannot be handled in extend
for large and complex systems on one local compute and storage resource only. Processes
like processing jobs, visualisation, traveling salesman problems, and multimedia production
have to be transferred to systems with the capacity necessary for multiple requests at the
same time. We should not isolate scholarly research from long term information science
concepts and architectures used in geosciences disciplines. Therefore the overall goal is to
integrate systems, concepts, software, hardware and other components on a higher level of
collaboration and strategical decision. As many application scenarios arise from geosciences
and natural sciences, a number of examples are given based on implementations from these
disciplines and case studies done over the last decade. Present activities and future work to
be done on development and strategies level are presented to help overcome the stagnancy
in the evolution of integrated systems. This chapter will show the components that in most
other cases are discussed independently and presents a basic concept for integrating systems
as successfully used with geosciences and natural sciences case studies.
2. Capability versus capacity
The high end computing world vastly used by geosciences researchers can be described
with capability computing on the one hand and capacity computing on the other hand
which provide complex tools to expand the means and methods of research by continuously
expanding the limits of feasibility.
2.1 Capability computing
Capability computing means to target the grand challenge problems in certain fields. This
will for example be the case with earthquake simulation, multi-dimensional modeling of the
earth's underground, tornado simulation, atmosphere simulation, galaxy cluster simulation,
non-linear computation of complex structures, life-sciences and epidemiological simulation,
archaeological and architectural simulation. For the foreseeable future complex information
and computing systems will be a topic on this list as soon as resources evolve. Systems
for capability computing have to provide capacity for a few large jobs. Job processing for
single-job scenarios can handle larger problems or faster solution. For these single jobs have
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