The necessity to efficiently analyze an ever-increasing set of high-resolution geospatial data is becoming a pressing issue within the environmental scientific community. The main goal of this project is to study and experiment a general solution/methodology for simultaneously running environmental applications on different parallel and distributed environments such as Multicore, Cluster, Grid, Cloud, etc. The simultaneous execution on multiple environments is a complex and challenging task as it involves not only the interoperability of the applications with different parallel and distributed environments but also the interoperability and the coexistence of these environments. The research in this project is interdisciplinary as it requires the involvement of different leading experts from both the Environmental community (provided by enviroSPACE team and other colleagues at UNIGE and UNEP) and the Computer Science field (provided by the Technical University of Cluj Napoca, with inputs from the UNIGE teams). The project is structured in three phases, each of them with a clear goal and associated deliverables. These phases cover (1) the analysis and specifications of environmental applications and geoprocessing platform requirements; (2) porting specific geopreocessing applications on different parallel and distributed infrastructures, with an emphasis on a hydrological application (SWAT) using standardized web services; and finally (3) proposing and developing a general methodology for executing geospatial environmental applications simultaneously on different parallel and distributed architectures, such as Grid, Cluster, Cloud, etc. The developed methodology would allow users to easily port environmental applications to run on multiple environments and to benefit from all the advantages exposed by these platforms. Both the environmental and computer science communities will profit from the outputs of the project, which will be featured in interdisciplinary international peer-reviewed journals.

The 18-month project runs from July 2013 to December 2014 and is funded by the CRUS/SCIEX program.

Coordinator/Main applicant: Nicolas Ray

Romanian Mentor: Dorian Gorgan

SCIEX fellow: Denisa Rodila