Using High-Performance Computing to Address the Challenge of Land Use/Land Cover Change Analysis on Spatial Big Data

Land use/land cover change (LUCC) analysis is a fundamental issue in regional and global geography that can accurately reflect the diversity of landscapes and detect the differences or changes on the earth’s surface. However, a very heavy computational load is often unavoidable, especially when processing multi-temporal land cover data with fine spatial resolution using more complicated procedures, which often takes a long time when performing the LUCC analysis over large areas. This paper employs a graph-based spatial decomposition that represents the computational loads as graph vertices and edges and then uses a balanced graph partitioning to decompose the LUCC analysis on spatial big data. For the decomposing tasks, a stream scheduling method is developed to exploit the parallelism in data moving, clipping, overlay analysis, area calculation and transition matrix building. Finally, a change analysis is performed on the land cover data from 2015 to 2016 in China, with each piece of temporal data containing approximately 260 million complex polygons. It took less than 6 h in a cluster with 15 workstations, which was an indispensable task that may surpass two weeks without any optimization.