SSP 1998 Project Summary:
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Parallel vector-topological data input for Geographical Information Systems

Student

Eurico Moita, University of Lisbon

Supervisor

Terry Sloan

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) permit the storage, display and manipulation of spatially referenced data. Continued rapid growth in the availability of digital cartographic data and satellite images is creating a demand for intensive computing to integrate and process large datasets. Such datasets can be collected and integrated from a wide variety of sources, including geological, political and census databases. This information can then be used to solve problems in areas such as environmental assessment, transportation, marketing, distribution, telecommunications, planning and resource management.

GIS processing is both computationally and I/O intensive. This makes GIS an ideal application for parallel processing, where performance and I/O can be increased in a modular and scalable way. Consequently the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, in partnership with the Department of Geography, has developed GIS systems that exploit parallel processing technology.

A scalable, extensible, parallel library of core GIS operations has been designed and partly implemented to interface to some of the major commercial GIS packages. These core operations are polygon overlay, and conversion between raster and vector data formats.

These core operations have been designed in a modular fashion enabling the substantial re-use of code segments. Full parallel designs have been produced for all components of all operations.

The final report for this project is available here.
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