High Performance Computing for Land Cover Dynamics

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

9318183 Davis The Grand Challenge Application Groups competition provides one mechanism for the support of multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers to meet the goals of the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Initiative in Fiscal Year 1993. The ideal proposal provided not only the opportunity to achieve significant progress on (1) a fundamental problem in science or engineering whose solution could be advanced by applying high performance computing techniques and resources, or (2) enabling technologies which facilitate those advances but also significant interactions between scientific and computational activities, usually involving mathematical, computer or computational scientist, that would have impact in high performance computational activities beyond the specific scientific or engineering problem area(s) or discipline being studied. The investigators will study the application of high performance parallel computing to a class of scientifically important and computationally demanding problems in remote sensing- land cover dynamics problems including generating improved- fine spatial resolution data for the global carbon cycle, hydrological modeling and global ecological responses to climate changes and human activity. The research is collaborative, including scientist from the University of Maryland, University of Indiana, University of news Hampshire and NASA's Goddard Space Center. The award will combine research on -new analysis procedures for remotely sensed data -the integration of multispectral, multiresolution and multitemporal image data sets into a unified global data structure based on hierarchical data structures (i.e., quadtrees) -the utilization of these hierarchical, parallel data structures for the representation of spatial data (maps and products developed from image analysis) and the development of a spatial data base system with a sophisticate d query language that scientist can use to control the application of biophysical models to global data sets -run-time support for constructing scalable and parallel solutions to problems involving the manipulation of irregular data structures such as quadtrees -parallel l/O,especially novel methods for mapping large arrays and quadtrees onto parallel disks and disk systems, and for accessing them using low overhead bulk transfers The development work will be conducted on a 32 processor Connection Machine CM5, installed at the University of Maryland, and on an IBM SP1 which we propose to obtain as part of the program. This award is being supported by the Advanced Projects Research Agency as well as NSF programs in geological, biological, and computer sciences.