A Distributed System for Storing and Processing Data from Earth-observing Satellites: System Design and Performance Evaluation of the Visualisation Tool

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable distributed system for storing, processing, and visualizing satellite Earth observation data, emphasizing high performance, portability, and modern web technologies.

Contribution

It presents a novel system architecture combining high-performance backend with a portable web client for satellite data visualization and analysis.

Findings

System demonstrates high performance and scalability.

Client is highly portable using HTML5 and WebGL.

Performance evaluation shows effective user experience.

Abstract

We present a distributed system for storage, processing, three-dimensional visualisation and basic analysis of data from Earth-observing satellites. The database and the server have been designed for high performance and scalability, whereas the client is highly portable thanks to having been designed as a HTML5- and WebGL-based Web application. The system is based on the so-called MEAN stack, a modern replacement for LAMP which has steadily been gaining traction among high-performance Web applications. We demonstrate the performance of the system from the perspective of an user operating the client.