Grid technology for the storage and processing of remote sensing data: description of an application

Space missions involve the download,from space to ground, of many raw images per day. The analysis and sharing of these huge amounts of data is a big challenge for the remote sensing community. The emerging computational grid technologies are expected to make feasible the creation of a computational environment handling many PetaBytes of distributed data, tens of thousands of heterogeneous computing resources, and thousands of simultaneous users from multiple research institutions. The first results obtained in an experiment aiming to demonstrate the use of grid technology for remote sensing applications will be shown. The experiment has been carried out within the DataGrid project funded by the European Union.