Cloud computing-based high accuracy surface modeling method for China’s Poyang Lake basin DEM generation

The increasing availability of big spatial data demands large-scale surface modeling methods. To find a solution for large-scale surface modeling problem, based on previously developed high accuracy surface modeling (HASM) method, an extended high accuracy surface modeling method utilizing cloud computing is developed. The developed method was run on a Hadoop-based cloud computing environment comprising four computers and applied for China’s Poyang Lake basin digital elevation model construction. The experiments results indicate that the cloud computing-based method outperforms the general sequential method based on single computer significantly and attains three times speedups. Furthermore, the improved schedule algorithm for cloud computing-based HASM has further accelerated the computing speed.