Remote-sensing-driven urban change detection has been studied in many ways for decades for a wide field of applications, such as understanding socio-economic impacts, identifying new settlements, or analyzing trends of urban sprawl. Such kinds of analyses are usually carried out manually by selecting high-quality samples that binds them to small-scale scenarios, either temporarily limited or with low spatial or temporal resolution. We propose a fully automated method that uses a large amount of available remote sensing observations for a selected period without the need to manually select samples. This enables continuous urban monitoring in a fully automated process. Furthermore, we combine multispectral optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data from two eras as two mission pairs with synthetic labeling to train a neural network for detecting urban changes and activities. As pairs, we consider European Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) and Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) for 1991–2011 and Sentinel 1 and 2 for 2017–2021. For every era, we use three different urban sites—Limassol, Rotterdam, and Liège—with at least 500km2 each, and deep observation time series with hundreds and up to over a thousand of samples. These sites were selected to represent different challenges in training a common neural network due to atmospheric effects, different geographies, and observation coverage. We train one model for each of the two eras using synthetic but noisy labels, which are created automatically by combining state-of-the-art methods, without the availability of existing ground truth data. To combine the benefit of both remote sensing types, the network models are ensembles of optical- and SAR-specialized sub-networks. We study the sensitivity of urban and impervious changes and the contribution of optical and SAR data to the overall solution. Our implementation and trained models are available publicly to enable others to utilize fully automated continuous urban monitoring.
For large-scale High Performance Computing centers with a wide range of different projects and heterogeneous infrastructures, efficiency is an important consideration. Understanding how compute jobs are scheduled is necessary for improving the job scheduling strategies in order to optimize cluster utilization and job wait times. This increases the importance of a reliable simulation capability, which in turn requires accuracy and comparability with historic workloads from the cluster. Not all job schedulers have a simulation capability, including the Portable Batch System (PBS) resource manager. Hence, PBS based centers have no direct way to simulate changes and optimizations before they are applied to the production system. We propose and discuss how to run job simulations for large-scale PBS based clusters with the Maui Scheduler. This also includes awareness of node downtimes, scheduled and unexpected. For validation purposes, we use historic workloads collected at the IT4Innovations supercomputing center. The viability of our approach is demonstrated by measuring the accuracy of the simulation results compared to the real workloads. In addition, we discuss how the change of the simulator's time step resolution affects the accuracy as well as simulation times. We are confident that our approach is also transferable to enable job simulations for other computing centers using PBS.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.