[MUSIC] Now we have covered the definitions of geographic information science and systems, and the computer architecture, where GIS is closely related to. Let's move on to cyber infrastructure. For quite a while, personal computing was a main mechanism for scientific work, and also for your personal work. From a few decades ago, cyber environments have emerged. In cyber environments, we see a lot of computing resources are interconnected with each other. And these resources are operational in parallel. And oftentimes, even for a individual computer, we see a number of cores, many cores, for instance. Even our laptops today has multiple cores. And for some of you who like computer games, GPU graphics processing unit, this is now everywhere. So we're living in cyber environments where parallel computing resources are provisioned very persistently. And as such, computing resources have heterogeneous architecture. Although, the primary architecture is architecture still the foundational architecture. But there are variations of different architecture that poses heterogeneity that GIS needs to take into consideration. And our mobile devices is another major element of our cyber environments. What distinguish mobile devices from a number of other computing resources in cyber environments is this is very easy interactivity. So we interact with our mobile devices interactively, meaning we post request to our mobile devices. Our mobile devices give us responses immediately. That is a very interesting and exciting modality of computing in our cyber environment. Another key characteristic of our cyber environment is it's a distributed nature. Today, we access, for instance, Google services, our Gmail, or our Google Mapping Services. These are provisioned as services, which is closely connected to the notion of infrastructure. Just like we access water and electricity, these are provisioned to us as a societal service mechanism. And today, we're accessing computing through service oriented architecture, and the mechanisms. And these are enabled through cloud, and also increasingly through edge computing, which is inclusive of massive number of devices. Each device has reasonable computing power, but these devices are interconnected, and working together in a concerted fashion to provide a fabric cyber infrastructure. Which is getting to be operating at extreme scale, not only the computing part, but also information access and management, as well as communications. For instance, we have numerous mobile devices could work together through our social media channels as an example. So in the context of such cyber environments, which, basically, you have taken for granted for the past few decades. What this means to GIS is we now need to consider GIS in the context of such massive, and involving, to some degree, complex cyber environments. That in turn enable new discovery and innovation, and many, many applications we might have not thought about a few decades ago. So I'm quoting the most popular definition of cyber infrastructure, or essentially as an argument. If infrastructure is required for a industrial economy, then we could say that cyber infrastructure is required for a knowledge economy. CyberGIS, we're going to learn next is essentially situated between cyber environments, and a variety of geospatial applications to achieve very diverse, but powerful discovery and innovation opportunities. Speaking of the essential components of cyber infrastructure, you could essentially view these six components as the main backbone of advanced cyber infrastructure. We already talked about high performance computing systems, and data storage systems. For instance, if we think of Google Map or Earth, that's essentially sitting on top of terabytes of data somewhere stored in the cloud that allows us to interact with our map services, and also advanced instruments. This could be drones, could be different sensors deployed, and data repositories. For instance, our libraries here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, one of the best libraries in the US hosted it on a university campus. They're increasingly become digital. Library has a variety of digital repositories, and such repositories are becoming increasingly accessible online. For instance, today I rarely actually go to libraries, the physical collections place. I go online search, and the digital repositories are very friendly to work with. And the visualization environments is certainly important from GIS point of view, because GIS oftentimes provide intuitive visual interface to interact with the data, and associated analytics from geospatial point of view. And the visualization is a very important way of communicating information for both scientific purpose, as well as for many application purposes. And oftentimes, as I mentioned this, cyber environments are by nature distributed. We need high speed networks to link these different components together to work in a infrastructure fashion. Last thing I want to highlight, obviously, is not the least important part of cyber infrastructure, is people. Just like many other types of infrastructure, humans in our society have constructed. People is essential to cyber infrastructure, because we need deep expertise for all these components to work together. And then, of course, cyber infrastructure also represents a subject of scientific study. For instance, how do we envision what would be the future of advanced cyber infrastructure, and to control computing resources to make computing resources work together? As cyber infrastructure is likely the most complex research tasks, compared to similar infrastructures human beings and our society have constructed. This is a very challenging task to do, but has enormous benefits to the society. To give you an example of advanced cyber infrastructure from geospatial point of view, we have a geospatial supercomputer called ROGER, stands for Resourcing Open Geospatial Education and Research. This supercomputer was constructed about five years ago through the National Science Foundation Award to the University of Illinois. And you see the major components of this supercomputer essentially is a very data driven. It has a large data repository that could be accessed with high performance, because it's based on solid state drives for applications need high speed data access. It has also GPU capabilities for exploiting massive geospatial data parallelism, as well as a cloud component enabling interactive visualization services. So all of these components are integrated into a single computer, which is arguably the first geospatial supercomputer constructed ever in the history of science and technology. Now, you think of this supercomputer as a component of advanced cyber infrastructure. And you could imagine there are possibly many applications that could be enabled, otherwise would not be possible. And I'll mention some applications and sciences in the later part of our introduction to this course. And here's a picture of the ROGER system. If you go to the University of Illinois CyberGIS Center's website, this is under the menu option of Research. And within that, you click Infrastructure. You will get to this page. And this website has a pretty comprehensive information about what ROGER could do for different applications, and how you access its capabilities. Virtual ROGER is a recent upgrade of ROGER. ROGER was initially constructed as a geospatial supercomputer, including essentially three main parts. One is focused on big data, as I mentioned, has around five petabytes raw, high performance storage space, as well as high performance computing component. And the cloud computing component, and integrate together through a common data repository that links these three computing modalities together. Virtual ROGER is built on top of that with cutting edge CyberGIS software, which I'll mention briefly in this introduction. But we'll learn more throughout this course. After we have covered these major components of cyber infrastructure, we're now well equipped to learn CyberGIS as our next topic.
