Grid based model computation of virtual geographic environment: application in Pearl River Delta air pollution visualization
Bingli Xu, Hui Lin, Jun Zhu, Sammy Tang, Wenshi Lin, Jianbin Wu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
Virtual Geographic Environment (VGE) is a virtual representation of the physical world, culture world and imaginary world. Compared with GIS, VGE has two core components, which are Data and Model respectively. Many models in VGE are complex and therefore the model calculations for them are very time consuming as well. How to decrease and reduce the required model computation time to improve VGE efficiency will be a vital and key issue for most of the VGE implementation. In this research, we adopt CUGrid as the model computation server, which contains more than two hundred CPUs for fast and intensive computation. With the CUGrid, MM5 based air pollution data in Pearl River Delta is used as the test case for this study. According to the test results, we managed to reduce the required model computation time from the original three months on one specific desktop to several minutes on the CUGrid. Another significance and benefit of this research is that we also able to integrate MM5 with geographic information, which makes concepts on air pollution can easily be understood by the public.