High-performance Computing Cluster
GIBD is equipped with a high-performance big data computing cluster (HPC), serving as a testbed for geospatial big data analytics and computing-intensive research and applications. The lab is also equipped with Deep Learning Workstations powered by high-end NVIDIA Titan XP GPUs for deep learning research and development.
Big Data Computing Platform
On top of the computing infrastructure, GIBD develops a Geospatial Big Data computing platform with a set of innovative parallel processing algorithms, spatiotemporal indices, query analytical tools, and interactive web portals to efficiently manage, analyze and visualize tens of billions of geotagged tweets, terabytes of climate data, and other big data such as mobile location data, taxi trip data, and electronic health records. For example, using the platform, massive tweets can be queried, extracted, and visualized within seconds based on the criteria of spatial regions, keywords, time period, and spatial resolutions.
Geospatial Big Data Resource
GIBD had been streaming geotagged tweets for the whole world from 2015 to 2023 using the official Twitter Streaming API. In addition, the lab also processed the Twitter Stream Grab from Internet Archive with tweets (~1% sample of the entire twitter stream) from 2012 to 2020. In total, we have over 18.6 billion tweets stored and managed in our secure data server. In addition, the lab also has maintained a place visitation database obtained from SafeGraph for human mobility related research. This big dataset includes visitations data for over 5 million places in the US (including HIV clinics, hospitals, and night bars etc.).
All these big data datasets are stored and managed in our secured high-performance big data computing cluster and can be rapidly queried and analyzed using our Geospatial Big Data computing platform for supporting different application areas such as disaster management and public health. For example, mining massive amount of geotagged tweets can help support disaster management by examining the physical infrastructure (e.g., road damage), environment (e.g., flood extent), and nature-human interaction (e.g., evacuation) from spatial, temporal, and social dimensions.
Conference Room
The lab has a modern conference room with a large TV display for video conferencing and presentations and an interactive big data visualization station.
