Monitoring and Benchmarking Geospatial Workflows for Efficient & Reproducible EO (Serkan Girgin)

“Monitoring and Benchmarking Geospatial Workflows for Efficient and Reproducible Earth Observation” by Serkan Girgin Earth Observation Summer School 2026 17 Aug 2026 – 21 Aug 2026, Istanbul, Turkey https://opengeohub.org/events/earth-observation-summer-school-2026 The rapid growth of EO data from satellites, drones, and other sensors has led to increasingly complex geospatial workflows. These workflows often involve multiple software components, heterogeneous computing environments, and large data volumes. As a result, performance bottlenecks and inefficient use of computing resources can significantly impact research productivity and reproducibility. This lecture introduces the fundamental concepts needed to understand and evaluate the performance of geospatial workflows. The session begins with an overview of typical EO computing environments, from laptops and workstations to high-performance computing clusters and cloud platforms, and discusses why simply scaling resources is often insufficient without proper analysis of workflow behavior. Participants will learn how to interpret key system metrics such as CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, and network utilization, and how operating system tools can be used to observe these metrics during workflow execution. The lecture will then introduce the concept of benchmarking as a systematic method for measuring and comparing workflow performance. A significant part of the lecture focuses on best practices for designing reproducible benchmarking experiments, including controlled experimental environments, fair comparison of alternative tools or methods, reproducible workflow documentation, appropriate dataset selection, meaningful performance metrics, and transparent reporting of results. Through real examples and discussion, participants will learn how benchmarking can support different research contributions, from methodological comparisons to state-of-the-art algorithm development. The session concludes with an introduction to automated benchmarking tools and a preview of the accompanying hands-on tutorial, where participants will apply these concepts using the Geobench framework.