The efforts of this distributed classroom – US, China, Brazil – was presented by Heidi Alvarez at the Chinese American Networking Symposium, October 20-22, 2008. Publications are in progress. There is a related publication: Khalid Saleem, S. Masoud Sadjadi, and Shu-Ching Chen, “Towards a self-configurable weather research and forecasting system,” Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC-2008), Chicago, IL, June 2008.
Students in the US and China developed a web-based, self-configurable, on-demand weather research forecast portal that utilizes the Weather Research Forecast (WRF) model to configure and schedule on-demand, asset-specific weather forecast runs for domains encompassing these assets, and generates weather visualizations relevant to its audience.
To date, they have focused on hurricanes, utilizing ensembles for better and effective storm track and intensity predictions. The portal is an interactive, easily accessible Web-based interface for user-specific WRF model configurations, and runs for the domains or assets defined by meteorologists, business owners, and emergency management officials. The distributed software model runs on heterogeneous computing nodes at multiple sites simultaneously – including the MareNostrum supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – to improve the speed of results, the resolution of the numerical model, and the scalability of user requests.
High-resolution images need large-scale displays. This project also utilizes the visualization capabilities of SAGE, developed by UIC/EVL. Above, the left image shows the FIU web portal page and highlights the visualization areas of interest; the image on the right is the 4x5 tiled display wall at CNIC, China, showing high-resolution data. Students also developed a SAGE web browser interface and a Wii remote interface.
URL:
www.cyberbridges.net
http://wrf-model.org/index.php
http://www.top500.org/system/8242
Collaborators:
USA:
Florida International University (FIU)/Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA)
Brazil:
Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF); Universidade Catolica de Santos (UniSantos); National Institute for Space Research; Polytechnic School from Sao Paulo University
Barcelona:
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)/Computer Network Information Center (CNIC); China
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Special thanks for SAGE: University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)/Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL)
