CyberGIS-Compute: Middleware for democratizing scalable geocomputation
Alexander C. Michels,
Anand Padmanabhan,
Zimo Xiao,
Mit Kotak,
Furqan Baig,
Shaowen Wang
Affiliations
Alexander C. Michels
CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W Green St, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA
Anand Padmanabhan
CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W Green St, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA
Zimo Xiao
CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W Green St, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA; Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA
Mit Kotak
CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W Green St, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA; Center for Computational Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA
Furqan Baig
CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W Green St, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA
Shaowen Wang
CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1301 W Green St, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA; Corresponding author.
CyberGIS—geographic information science and systems (GIS) based on advanced cyberinfrastructure—is becoming increasingly important to tackling a variety of socio-environmental problems like climate change, disaster management, and water security. While recent advances in high-performance computing (HPC) have the potential to help address these problems, the technical knowledge required to use HPC has posed challenges to many domain experts. In this paper, we present CyberGIS-Compute: a geospatial middleware tool designed to democratize HPC access for solving diverse socio-environmental problems. CyberGIS-Compute does this by providing a simple user interface in Jupyter, streamlining the process of integrating domain-specific models with HPC, and establishing a suite of APIs friendly to domain experts.
