Tag Archives: Technology Wave

Grid ComputingSome consider this to be the “the third information technology wave” after the Internet and Web, and will be the backbone of the next generation of services and applications that are going to further the research and development of GIS and related areas.Grid computing allows for the sharing of processing power, enabling the attainment of high performances in computing, management and services. Grid computing, (unlike the conventional supercomputer that does parallel computing by linking multiple processors over a system bus) uses a network of computers to execute a program. The problem of using multiple computers lies in the difficulty of dividing up the tasks among the computers, without having to reference portions of the code being executed on other CPUs.Parallel processingParallel processing is the use of multiple CPU’s to execute different sections of a program together. Remote sensing and surveying equipment have been providing vast amounts of spatial information, and how to manage, process or dispose of this data have become major issues in the field of Geographic Information Science (GIS).To solve these problems there has been much research into the area of parallel processing of GIS information. This involves the utilization of a single computer with multiple processors or multiple computers that are connected over a network working on the same task. There are many different types of distributed computing, two of the most common are clustering and grid processing.The primary reasons for using parallel computing are:Saves time.Solve larger problems.Provide concurrency (do multiple things at the same time).Taking advantage of non-local resources – using available computing resources on a wide area network, or even the Internet when local computing resources are scarce.Cost savings – using multiple “cheap” computing resources instead of paying for time on a supercomputer.Overcoming memory constraints -