Using FOSS to develop and operate a geospatial computing platform

The Geospatial Computing Platform (GCP) is ITC's state-of-the-art interactive computing platform provided to its staff, students, and alumni (https://crib.utwente.nl). The platform is designed to serve for self-learning, exploratory research, and education activities. It provides a user-friendly interface for geospatial data analysis and visualisation tasks with hundreds of ready-to-use scientific and geospatial software packages, including desktop applications, machine learning frameworks, distributed computing frameworks, and GPU-enabled computing capabilities. It is also based on 100% free and open-source software (FOSS). This presentation provides information on how such a computing platform can be developed by using FOSS. The architecture and software components of the platform are described and our experience in designing and operating the GCP is presented.