Eight Times Acceleration of Geospatial Data Archiving and Distribution on the Grids

A grid-powered Web Geographical Information Science (GIS)/Web Processing Service (WPS) system has been developed for archiving and distributing large volumes of geospatial data. However, users, WPS servers, and data resources are always distributed across different locations, attempting to access and archive geospatial data from a GIS survey via conventional Hypertext Transport Protocol, Network File System Protocol, and File Transfer Protocol, which often encounters long waits and frustration in wide area network (WAN) environments. To provide a “local-like” performance, a WAN/grid-optimized protocol known as “GridJet” developed at our lab was used as the underlying engine between WPS servers and clients, which utilizes a wide range of technologies including the one of paralleling the remote file access. No change in the way of using software is required since the multistreamed GridJet protocol remains fully compatible with the existing IP infrastructures. Our recent progress includes a real-world test that PyWPS and Google Earth over the GridJet protocol beat those over the classic ones by a factor of two to eight, where the distribution/archiving distance is over 10 000 km.