Cloud Computing for Geoscience: Meet Fei Hu

Hello World! My name is Fei Hu, a second-year Ph.D. student at George Mason University. I’m interested in the spatiotemporal information, such as maps, trajectory data, social media data and satellite images. My undergraduate major was GIS. During that time, I developed several programs to visualize both vector and raster data. When changing projections, the shape of countries can change so much you can hardly identify them. When zooming into high resolution images, you can see people hiking on mountains. After I entered graduate school, my research interests pushed me to analyze much bigger spatiotemporal datasets, e.g. climate data. Since a single computer’s resources are limited, I started to learn some high performance computing technologies, e.g. cloud computing – right now I am learning OpenStack. In the picture I've included, it shows me installing OpenStack on 256 nodes for the GMU hybrid cloud platform.

I am glad to join ESIP as the student fellow for the Cloud Computing cluster. It has given me a lot of opportunities to communicate with the professionals in the cloud computing domains, and the people who are using or are interested in cloud computing. I am developing some tools based on Spark to support big climate data analytics, and trying to deploy them on the cloud, which will make these tools easy to use by just signing in to the cloud platform. My goal is to relieve scientists from the complex and time-consuming computation tasks in the future.

I just built my personal blog, and you can also tweet me @Fei__Hu. Please stay connected with ESIP by Twitter and Facebook.