Technology

The various components of the GEON system are shown in the following diagram. You may click on each module to obtain more information about it.

The GEON architecture consists of a single GEON Portal and a number of distributed GEON sites and GEON service providers. The Portal provides a single point of entry into this distributed environment. Remote sites and service providers operate in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment of GEON.

The site at the San Diego Supercomputer Center hosts a variety of servers, including a portal server, data server, GIS server, computer cluster, and various beta and development machines. Remote sites in the GEON network may deploy a point of presence (PoP) machine. All servers, at the central site as well as remote sites, run the same software stack, which is configured and deployed using ROCKS.

A site may deploy a PoP node to host data, tools, and other resources contributed into the GEON network or as a development system to develop Web services, tools, and applications using the common GEON software environment, thereby ensuring that the software will interoperate with the rest of the network when it is deployed. Again, such software may be deployed (“hosted”) on the PoP node at the site, or may be moved to the central site and hosted from the central location.

Resources (data and tools) may also be contributed into the GEON network by providing Web service interfaces to the same. In this case, there is no requirement to install a PoP node at the remote site. The provider only needs to ensure that their Web services are able to interoperate with the GEON SOA environment.

In some cases, sites may actually host other servers in addition to the PoP node, e.g. additional data servers and/or compute clusters, which are provided as shared resources in GEON.