A grid-powered Web Geographical Information Science (GIS)/Web Processing Service (WPS) system has been developed for archiving and distributing large volumes of geospatial data. However, users, WPS servers, and data resources are always distributed across different locations, attempting to access and archive geospatial data from a GIS survey via conventional Hypertext Transport Protocol, Network File System Protocol, and File Transfer Protocol, which often encounters long waits and frustration in wide area network (WAN) environments. To provide a “local-like” performance, a WAN/grid-optimized protocol known as “GridJet” developed at our lab was used as the underlying engine between WPS servers and clients, which utilizes a wide range of technologies including the one of paralleling the remote file access. No change in the way of using software is required since the multistreamed GridJet protocol remains fully compatible with the existing IP infrastructures. Our recent progress includes a real-world test that PyWPS and Google Earth over the GridJet protocol beat those over the classic ones by a factor of two to eight, where the distribution/archiving distance is over 10 000 km.

In the above-named work the name of one of the authors is incorrectly given. Included here also is the biography with the missing IEEE membership information.

This paper describes the grid-oriented storage (GOS) architecture and its implementations. A GOS-specific file system (GOS-FS), the single-purpose intent of a GOS OS, and secure interfaces via grid security infrastructure (GSI) motivate and enable this new architecture. As an FTP server, GOS with a slimmed OS, with a total volume of around 150 MB, outperforms the standard GridFTP by 20-40 percent. As a file server, GOS-FS acts as a network/grid interface, enabling a user to perform searches and access resources without downloading them locally. In the real-world tests between Cambridge and Beijing, where the transfer distance is 10,000 km, the multistreamed GOS-FS file opening/saving resulted in a remarkable performance increase of about 2-25 times, compared to the single-streamed network file system (NFSv4). GOS is expected to be a variant of or successor to the well-used network-attached storage (NAS) and/or storage area network (SAN) products in the grid era