Cloud Computing Technology & GIS Applications

Suraj Pandey

Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory

Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
The University of Melbourne, Australia
spandey@csse.unimelb.edu.au
http://www.cloudbus.org/spandey

Abstract—Cloud Computing has emerged as a major

technological breakthrough for small to medium scale II. CLOUD COMPUTING ARCHITECTURE
enterprises and software users who are looking for dynamic In this section, we present a general Cloud Computing
scalability at a low or zero initial investment. GIS is a field of architecture. Figure 1 shows the architecture that comprises
science, which could use Cloud Computing for distributed of Cloud Infrastructure and GIS applications.
parallel processing of large set of data, and store and share the
end results with users from around the world. In this paper, we
propose a architecture for GIS data processing using Cloud
Computing technologies.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, GIS Applications,

I. INTRODUCTION
GIS applications are generally both compute and data
intensive in nature. GIS technology has been around for
decades. These mature technologies are increasingly using
geospatial and non-spatial data. Advance data collection
technologies have facilitated large amounts of rich data to be
collected at diverse data sources. In time, size of these data
would grow to be large enough to restrict any single
organization to maintain and handle these data. In addition,
GIS functions and services that operate on these data are
geographically and logically distributed due to the source of
data, location of computing facilities and organizations. The
spatial analysis on large amount of data is complex and
computationally intensive.
In order to share and collaborate GIS data and the
computation results among geographically dispersed users, a
scalable and low cost computation platform, such as Cloud
Computing – is required for GIS application.
Cloud Computing is been defined by many as a platform
that can be scaled dynamically using a pay-as-you-go model
[3,4,5]. According to the Buyya et al. [2], Cloud Computing Figure 1. GIS Applications using Cloud Computing infrastructure.
is: “a type of parallel and distributed system consisting of a
collection of interconnected and virtualized computers that are
Amazon is a public Cloud service provider. Using its
dynamically provisioned and presented as one or more unified web services, it gives end-users access to virtualized
computing resources based on service-level agreements”. These compute nodes and large storage space. For using these
definitions reflect the fact that both compute and data services, users have to pay a nominal cost, charged according
intensive applications, such as GIS applications, can readily to the number of hours used: pay-as-you-go model. In Figure
be moved to Clouds. 1, we have used Amazon EC2 and S3 for compute and
In this paper, we present an architectural overview for storage of GIS applications, respectively.
using Cloud Computing for GIS applications. The rest of the GIS applications running on user’s end submit
paper is organized as follows: first, we present architecture application and data to the front-eng web-service. This web-
for the Cloud Computing model that integrates the GIS service in turn using a suitable middleware to distributed the
applications; next, we describe a typical scenario when GIS application tasks to virtualized nodes. This distribution of
applications use Cloud Computing paradigm. tasks enabled parallel processing of user tasks. Similarly, for
the large amount of data, the web-service can directly use
Amazon S3 API to store the data in the S3. When the
analysis is being performed on Amazon EC2, data stored in share modes application data.
S3 can be retrieved at real-time and processed. The results Global Access Clusters are generally Virtual Machines in
obtained after computation and analysis can also be stored (Collaboration behind firewall and Clouds have public
in S3 for future reference. The users can then be notified between GIS are not accessible IPs and are accessible
asynchronously about the availability of the results. researchers) across domains from anywhere
around the world
In the design presented in Figure 1, one important factor
Cost Setting up of clusters Clouds provide pay-
for the application users is the flexibility it provided them for
need large amount of as-you-go model for
accessing the GIS application service. The user may be initial investment using its services.
located in different parts of the world and be able to access Failures/Mainta Failure rates of cluster Virtual Machines are
the service. He just needs to have access to the Internet and inence nodes are very high hosted in Cloud
have an account with the GIS application service. given their use by hardware that are
We rely on a GIS middleware to provide the computation large number of constantly upgraded
and analysis service to the user. This application is hosted in people (sharing by the service
the Amazon virtual machine nodes (VM) and is capable of mode). Maintenance provider. VMs can be
distributing user requests to a large number of worker nodes can be very expensive migrated online to
in real-time. Several other middleware such as Aneka and time consuming another host upon
(www.manjrasoft.com),Condor (www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/), for real-time GIS hardware failures.
SGE (http://gridengine.sunsource.net/), etc., can be used for applications.
this purpose. GIS Too much overheads Easy access for low
Traditionally, GIS applications would need dedicated Applications cost
clusters and storage space to compute and analyze large Table 1 Advantages of using Cloud Computing over traditional
amount of data. With the help of Cloud Computing, this approaches.
processing and storage responsibility can be offloaded to a
Cloud service provider. The user can just use a web III. CONCLUSION
interface to control the execution and flow of data. The end
Cloud Computing provides a plethora of benefits for GIS
results could then be obtained in real-time with minimal applications as compared to the traditional approaches, such
user intervention. Cloud based GIS application execution as the use of clusters and Grids. We have presented a design
and analysis has several advantages over traditional for using Cloud Infrastructure, in order to get GIS
approaches, as listed in Table 1. applications into the Cloud. Our design has used Amazon
services as an example of Cloud service provider.
Parameters Traditional Using Cloud
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