Many scientific problems make use of very large data sets. Examples
include land cover dynamics, submarine structural acoustics, analysis
of earth observation data, computational biology, computational
quantum chemistry, seismic data processing etc. The goals of our
research are to determine the I/O requirements of such applications
and to develop compile-time and run-time techniques to optimize their
performance on multiprocessor architectures with multiple disks or
disk arrays. Currently, the major driving applications for this work
are the University of Maryland's Land Cover Dynamics Grand Challenge
project, submarine structural acoustics and analysis of the data
generated by the Earth Observation
System project which is a part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth.
This research is being carried out in collaboration with the Scalable I/O consortium
and CRPC.
NSF/ARPA Grand Challenge
project on Land Cover Dynamics this project focuses on
employing high performance computing for applications in remote
sensing, specifically applications in land cover
dynamics. Understanding land cover dynamics is one of the most
important challenges in the study of global change. Research
involves developing scalable and portable programs for a variety of
image and map data processing applications, eventually ntegrated
with new models for parallel I/O of large scale images and maps.