Jin Xing finishes his Masters thesis

Congratulation, Jin for finishing your Masters. Now you can start your PhD!

IHC3: An Integrated Hybrid Cloud Computing Cyberinfrastructure for GIS/RS Research

ABSTRACT: With the advancement of technologies, earth observation data could be obtained with finer spatial and spectral resolution. However, the increasing volume and complexity of those high resolution data presents new challenges in geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) research, such as heterogeneous distributed data handling, efficient parallel data processing algorithms, easy manageability of the underlying cyberinfrastructure, new collaboration model and lower computation costs. Geospatial cloud computing is leveraged in GIS/RS research to address the challenges of heterogeneous distributed data and its processing. Although the early experience has proven it is a great success to utilize cloud computing in GIS/RS research, the manageability of the cyberinfrastructure cannot be neglected. To be manageable, I argue that cloud computing must handle domain specific problems in GIS/RS, manage privacy of data, ease of use, and be inexpensive.

In thesis I propose IHC3̶integrated hybrid cloud computing cyberinfrastructure for advanced scalability and easy manageability in GIS/RS cyberinfrastructure research. IHC3 is designed to seamlessly integrates the computing resource of local hardware with public cloud providers, and it can dynamically adjust the boundary of private and public cloud with respect to the variable workload. A set of functionalities to simplify the image data processing, analysis, and visualization in GIS/RS research are also implemented in IHC3. I use MODIS data re-projection experiment with IHC3 to evaluate IHC3’s performance, and compare the execution time and computation costs with single desktop, private cloud and Amazon EC2. The experiment proves that IHC3 is an effective platform for GIS/RS research, and it can offload the onerous system administration work from GIS/RS scientists, providing them with a tool for enhancing their research.