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

Abstract

Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH 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. Capability versus capacityThe 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. Capability computingCapability computing means to target the grand challenge problems in certain fields. This will for example be the case with earthquake simulation, multi-dimensional ...