Urgent Computing with Special Emphasis on Hydro-Meteo Disaster Management

Source: Informationsdienst Wissenschaft e.V.

Welcome to the Web page of the lecture Urgent Computing with Special Emphasis on Hydro-Meteo Disaster Management in Winter Semester 2013/2014. On this page you will find all information relating to the lecture.

Urgent Computing is gaining more and more importance in the context of distributed systems. This can in large parts be attributed to the recent availability of high performance e-infrastructures like PRACE, EGI, XSEDE, and their unprecedented computing and storage resources (like for example the SuperMUC at LRZ) which are a prerequisite of deadline driven high performance computing "on demand" across Grids and Clouds. Urgent Computing implies several unsolved research questions like advance reservation of resources, prioritized execution of long-running jobs, or the management of dynamic priority schemes. Application scenarios typically relate to developing advanced systems taking real-time data and enabling enhanced emergency situation and disaster management systems which is of paramount importance for the society and its critical infrastructures. Urgent Computing operates under a strict deadline after which the computational results may have little practical value where the onset of the event that necessitates the computation is unpredictable and where the computation requires significant resource usage.

One important use case is the management of and the reaction to flash floods (The above picture depicts a 3D representation of a high-resolution (1km) numerical model predicting the precipitation that generated the Genoa 4 November 2011 flash flood. The image is courtesy Nicola Rebora, CIMA Research Foundation, Italy.)

The lectures focuses on this multi-disciplinary topic in general and the ICT/Hydro-Meteo aspects in particular.

The lecture is organized in two blocks. While the ICT related block investigates the suitability of current e-infrastructures (Grids, Clouds, Web Services, Swarms) for Urgent Computing in general and Hydro-Meteo research (HMR) in particular, the HMR related block addresses typical HMR questions in this context. After a short introduction to EU weather scenarios we will discuss the spatial and temporal scales of extreme weather conditions (wind storms, thunderstorms, forest fire) and how to model them. An important aspect will be the computability of these models on various ICT infrastructures. Both aspects (ICT and HMR) will eventually be combined if we apply the findings to Urgent Computing in a very specific extreme weather phenomenon (the 2011 Genoa flash-flood) using services developed by the EU-funded DRIHM project (Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorology). Finally we will outline concepts for a future earth-system prediction initiative including a roadmap towards Urgent Computing-based world climate research.

We will try to supplement the lecture by invited talks of external experts.

Most of the lectures will be given in English.

The lecture will be part of the module "Vertiefende Themen der Informatik". It is a two-hour lecture without exercises. It counts for 3 ECTS points.

There are no prerequisites. However, a successful participation in the lecture on Grid Computing would be beneficial.

Oral examinations will be conducted at the end of the lectures.

The lecture will be held every Thursday, 10:00 ct, in room A016 of the LMU Main Building, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1.

A corresponding slide script will be available in the download area. The area is password protected. The access code will be communicated in the first lecture.

to be announced.