Our Mission
The HDCRS working group is part of the IEEE GRSS Earth Science Informatics (ESI) Technical Committee. The main objective of HDCRS is to connect a community of interdisciplinary researchers in remote sensing who are specialized on high-performance and distributed computing, quantum computing and parallel programming models with specialized hardware accelerators.
HDCRS disseminates information and knowledge through educational events, special sessions and tutorials at conferences and publication activities. The group welcomes anyone interested from academia and industry to contribute to our mission.


Research Topics
Supercomputing and Distributed Computing
Supercomputing is the processing of complex or data-intensive problems with a vast number of highly interconnected compute nodes that work in parallel (i.e., HPC). Distributed computing uses multiple compute resources not necessarily located in close proximity to one another but connected via Internet or other networks (e.g., cloud computing).
Specialized Hardware Computing
Specialized hardware accelerators (e.g., GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs) can perform some computing tasks more efficiently than is possible on general-purpose CPUs. Their high processing performance and energy efficiency is due to a combination of specialized operations, parallelism, efficient memory systems, and reduction of overhead.
Quantum computing
Quantum computing exploits explicitly quantum mechanical properties (i.e., superposition, entanglement, interference) of matter to perform computations. Emerging quantum technologies (e.g., gate-based and adiabatic quantum computing) have the potential to improve performance and solve previously intractable problems
HDCRS News
Events & Initiatives


GRSS ESI HDCRS End-to-End Machine Learning with High Performance and Cloud Computing
This tutorial provides a complete overview of the latest developments of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and Cloud Computing services.


IEEE GRSS Webinar
IEEE GRSS Webinar March 23, 2021 Online Event Page This webinar will introduce the new working group “High-performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing” (HDCRS)


Special Issue on ”Quantum Computing for Earth Observation”
Special Issue on ”Quantum Computing for Earth Observation” December 31, 2022 IEEE JSTARS JStars Page This special issue aims to introduce this extraordinary field to


Tutorial: “From Big EO Data to Digital Twins: Hybrid AI and Quantum based Paradigms”
Tutorial: “From Big EO Data to Digital Twins: Hybrid AI and Quantum based Paradigms” July 2021 IGARSS (Brussels, Belgium) Tutorial Page The tutorial will cover


1st International Workshop on Searching and Mining Large Collections of Geospatial Data (GeoSearch)
1st International Workshop on Searching and Mining Large Collections of Geospatial Data (GeoSearch) November 2, 2021 Online Program Page This workshop brings together the art


Tutorial on ”Scalable Machine Learning with High Performance and Cloud Computing”
Tutorial on “Scalable Machine Learning with High Performance and Cloud Computing” July 2021 IGARSS (Brussels, Belgium) Tutorial Page The tutorial provides a complete overview of
HDCRS Chairs


Dr. Gabriele Cavallaro


Prof. Dora Blanco Heras

