The Columbia Regional Geospatial Service Center’s efforts to provide regional geospatial support for emergency planning and response, economic development, and natural resource management, is supported by an active research program in all three areas. The Columbia Center is engaged in several research projects intended to improve data distribution and access both for the academic community, government, and the general public.
Emergency Planning and Response research is focused on finding better ways to integrate geospatial technology into incident response at the local level. Working closely with rural city and county emergency officials, The Columbia Center is developing applications and procedures specifically designed for this group. In addition, the Columbia Center is working with regional officials to find ways to better integrate geospatial technology in the Incident Command System.
Economic Development research is conducted through the Center for Economic Development and Research (CEDAR.) Under the direction of Dr. Gary Kronrad, CEDAR strives to develop new technologies that contribute to the economic welfare of East Texas.
Natural Resource Management research is conducted by the Columbia Center’s parent organization, the Forest Resources Institute (FRI). FRI is engaged in a variety of projects, including studies to asertain forest ownership and managment trends amoung non-industrial private Forest (NIPF) owners, developing better ways to conduct forest inventories(ETFI), watershed studies (Alto Watershed Project), and more.
Technology research at the Columbia Center focuses on maximizing performance of traditional computing systems, Grid Computing, and distributed storage technology. Current projects include collaboration with the Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory (LoCI) at the University of Tennessee. The latest product of this collaboration is REDDnet (pronounced “ready net”). REDDnet uses GRID technology to enhance the storage and distribution of remote sensing data. This translates to faster downloads for those wishing to access data.
The Research and Education Data Depot Network (REDDnet) is an NSF funded research initiative to build a distributed network storage system for data intensive collaboration. The Columbia Center is one of 6 institutions involved in the project along with The University of Tennessee, Vanderbilt University, Nevoa Networks, North Carolina State University and the University of Delaware.
The concept underlying REDDnet is that data storage should be part of the network infrastructure. Rather than a data repository at a single location, REDDnet storage is distributed across the wide-area net- work. Data is sliced into blocks and distributed across the network.
The similarity to a data RAID store is useful to understand this technology. Just as a RAID system stripes data across several physical disks to improve I/O performance and enable fault tolerance, REDDnet stripes data across depots.
REDDnet is based on Internet Back- plane Protocol (IBP) developed at the Logistical Computing and Internetworking (LoCI) Lab at the University of Tennessee. Several technologies are layered on top of IBP to enable different capabilities. One of these, called L-Store, developed at the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE), at Vanderbilt University, provides the file system abstraction and metadata maintenance that make REDDnet work. Tools developed at NEVOA Networks help manage the system.
The REDDnet project involves several application areas and Columbia Center’s involvement is focused on one of these, delivery of satellite remote sensing data. Other application areas are CMS – Elementary particle Physics at the CERN large Hadron collider, TeraScale Supernova Initiative, National Geospatial Digital Archive, and Retinopathy – Diabetic Eye Disease Screening in Peru and Bolivia.
The Columbia Center is in cooperation with AmericaView to develop the AmericaView/REDDnet Demonstration Project. This project provides fast download of AmericaView remote sensing archives through REDDnet. Phase 1 of the project is nearing completion at the time of this writing. Phase 1 involves a GloVis data discovery tool coupled with a L-Store download engine.
Learn more about REDDnet HERE.
Read about AmericaView/REDDnet application use cases HERE.
Try AmericaView/REDDnet HERE.
The Columbia Center is an active member of SURAgrid, a consortium of organizations collaborating and combining resources to help bring grid technology to the level of seamless, shared infrastructure. Involvement in SURAgrid provides access to high-performance computing resources that would otherwise be unavailable. In addition, the organization provides a means of collaborating with researchers from all across the southeastern United States.
The Columbia Center is focusing on three objectives within SURGgrid:
REDDnet - SURAgrid collaboration
Providing geospatial resources
Grid-enabling geospatial applications
In addition, the Columbia Center is working towards adding computational resources to SURAgrid.
SURAgrid is another example of the Columbia Center efforts to embrace a wide array of technologies in pursuit of our goals.