Queueing Aspects of Integrated Information and Computing Systems in Geosciences and Natural Sciences

Abstract

Modern geosciences widely rely on information science technologies. In most cases of scientific research applications, tools, and state of the art hardware architectures are infamously neglected and therefore their development is not pressed ahead and not documented, a fault for continuous and future developments. Information Systems and Computing Systems up to now live an isolated life, rarely integrated and mostly lacking essential features for future application. Although in general technology advances and new tools arise, there is a number of aspects that prevent interest groups from building complex integrated systems and components on a long term base. These issues, from hardware and system architecture aspects to software, legal, and collaborational aspects, are top in the queue for realisation show-stoppers. This chapter presents the current status of integrated information and computing systems. It discusses the most prominent technical and legal aspects for applications in geosciences and natural sciences. Todays state of the art information systems provide a plethora of features for nearly any field of application. Present computing systems can provide various distributed and high end compute power. Compute resources in most cases have to be supported by highly performing storage resources. The most prominent disciplines on up to date resources are natural sciences like geosciences, geophysics, physics, and many other fields with theoretical and applied usage scenarios. For geosciences both information systems as well as computing resources are essential means of day to day work. The most immanent limitation is that there are only a very few facilities with these systems combining the information systems features with powerful compute resources. The goal we have to work on for the next years is to facilitate this integration of information and computing systems. Modern information systems can provide various information and visualise context for different purposes beyond standard Geoscientific Information Systems (GIS). Fields demanding for handling, processing, and analysing geoscientific data are manyfold. Geophysics as well as applied sciences provide various methods as to name magneticmethods, gravitymethods, seismicmethods, tomography, electromagneticmethods, resistivity methods, induced polarisation, radioactivity methods, well logging and various 1