| Abstract: | This paper examines the potential impact of parallel computing on the computational performance of GIS. Performance analyses on existing GIS operations, vector topology creation and interpolation, in commercial GIS products in a serial environment are used to work out the critical computational factors that determine elapsed time performance. Analyses reveal that the extraction of all data necessary to perform a GIS operation at a particular geographical locality dominates the I/O and CPU resource usage. For GIS to benefit from parallel computing, the performance of this task must be addressed. |
