Here at work, we develop a series of tools for geospatial processing with multiple goals, expected maintenance durations, different scopes, generalization needs, and motivations. Note that about 10 years ago, here in Europe, a completely new approach to upstream and downstream services for Earth Observation began: ESA changed its data licenses, and distribution and access modalities entered the Big Data era.
Please, forgive the silly joke in the title of this semi-serious post, but lately I have been thinking about the strange fate of an area of general computing that I have spent more and more time in recently, as in the near and far past. For my job, I have utilized a series of scientific HPC clusters worldwide to solve multiple computing problems most efficiently by distributing computation across numerous nodes. Over the last thirty years, all such platforms have consistently shared the same common characteristics, which invariably pose a problem in their use for the average scientist (often a young/junior dedicated to a short-term project) in any application domain.