A distributed spatial computing prototype system in grid environment

Digital Earth has been a hot topic and research trend since it was proposed, and Digital China has drawn much attention in China. As a key technique to implement Digital China, grid is an excellent and promising concept to construct a dynamic, inter-domain and distributed computing environment. It is appropriate to process geographic information across dispersed computing resources in networks effectively and cooperatively. A distributed spatial computing prototype system is designed and implemented with the Globus Toolkit. Several important aspects are discussed in detail. The architecture is proposed according to the characteristics of grid firstly, and then the spatial resource query and access interfaces are designed for heterogeneous data sources. An open-up hierarchical architecture for resource discovery and management is represented to detect spatial and computing resources in grid. A standard spatial job management mechanism is implemented by grid service for convenient use. In addition, the control mechanism of spatial datasets access is developed based on GSI. The prototype system utilizes the Globus Toolkit to implement a common distributed spatial computing framework, and it reveals the spatial computing ability of grid to support Digital China.