Cloud Computing for Forest Fire Management. Dr. Nikos Athanasis, Prof. Kostas Kalabokidis University of the AEGEAN

Transcription

1 Cloud Computing for Forest Fire Management Dr. Nikos Athanasis, Prof. Kostas Kalabokidis University of the AEGEAN SUCRE Workshop: Open Source Clouds in the public sector, 16-17/04/2013

2 Agenda Challenges The VENUS-C Fire App Benefits Planned usage Lessons learned Video (4min)

3 Wildfires are ravaging our world Mediterranean basin: number of ignitions and the area affected by wildfire has increased exponentially over the last decades In 2007, the fires that occurred in southern Europe were among the worst on history record with over 3000 km 2 of forests burned in the United States, the annual area burned by wildfire increased in the last decade wildfires in western Russia in 2010, widespread burned thousands hectares of rangelands and forested areas 3

4 Challenges Being able to predict where a fire is most likely to strike and its behavior is vital during wildfire seasons across the globe. Spatiotemporal calculations using different geographical datasets often rely on huge computer resources. Civil protection agencies do not typically have these resources or the know-how to use state-of-the art technology. 4

5 GoND in VENUS-C Participation of the Geography of Natural Disasters (GoND) Lab, Dept. of Geography, Univ. of the Aegean in VENUS-C VENUS-C: e-science as a Service the first European distributed computing infrastructure that adopted a User-centric approach to Cloud Computing, putting the needs of end-user communities of researchers and small businesses at the forefront of development, and providing scalable and interoperable cloud resources both on commercial and open-source cloud infrastructures 5

6 VENUS-C Fire App VENUS-C Fire App is designed to: calculate and visualize the risk of wildfire ignition & simulate fire behavior in the Cloud; to assist with early warning, fire control and civil protection Provide end-users (firefighting forces, emergency mgt. crews, national authorities, researchers and academia) a user-friendly web-based graphical user interface 6

7 VENUS-C Fire App The system generates fire risk and weather maps each morning for the island s fire management team. The Fire Brigade uses the fire-risk data and fire simulations to inform the day's resource allocations. Based on the Fire app projections, personnel and fire trucks may be deployed throughout the island to areas that appear to be at particular risk that day. 7

8 3 uses cases: use case-1: Fire risk: 5-days forecast use case-2: Fire risk: real time data use case-3: Fire propagation simulation 8

9 Cloud s potential is perceived positively by the wildfire management community Fire Brigade of Greece: While wildfires do still break out, statistical evidence shows the department has been better prepared to respond to and control fires, preventing potential loss of life and property. [VENUS-C Fire App] was an opportunity to see how cloud computing can promptly support fire departments for the confrontation of wildfires in an operational and cost efficient way. 19/04/ CSISP

10 Cloud s potential is perceived positively by the wildfire management community it was an opportunity to see how cloud computing can promptly support fire departments for the confrontation of wildfires in an operational and cost efficient way /04/ CSISP

11 Benefits authorities can respond to different workload situations that have to deal with in 24-hour/7-day situations; e.g. unpredictable (fire propagation simulations during a fire event) and/or predictable (daily fire risk estimations) bursting of CPU needs during the months of June to September in a typical fire season of Mediterranean-type ecosystems Authorities operating the system can plan their actions more efficiently without the need to own, maintain or operate the physical machines used to make complex calculations the cloud provides the necessary processing power and storage that is required. the fire department does not need to have any huge processing power or storage capabilities locally. 11

12 benefit: transparent use of different cloud infrastructures, no vendor lock-in hybrid cloud hybrid cloud end users commercial cloud (MS Azure) open source cloud (OpenNebula) VMs VMs 12

13 Planned usage of cloud services European funded National research project ARISTEIA: cloud-based wildfire prevention and management information system (AEGIS) will be developed and applied in 7 different study locations spread out all over Greece with high-hazard, highvalue and high-use forest and other multi-purpose areas. 13

14 Planned usage of cloud services share resources among multiple fire agencies reduce costs at the same time Deliver more efficient and effective fire management 14

15 Lessons learned the migration effort (learning curve) for porting services in the cloud must not be underestimated, especially for running complicated algorithms. Migrating to the cloud is not trivial! Commercial clouds are more popular because of the user support and training. If the learning curve for using an open source cloud is reduced, it is possible to see an emergence of open source clouds in the public sector. Trust & privacy issues are important. However, in VENUS-C we did not have any legal issues. Only binary files were uploaded/ executed in the cloud, not source code. Policy makers in the public sector may thing there will be trust issues when using cloud solutions (lack of knowledge), but the cloud solution must be tested before to decide. Compare in-house vs. cloud-based solution.

16 Fighting Wildfires with Data

17 17 Thank you!

18 18 Backup slides

19 data collection Development of the VENUS-C Fire App application development application utilization

20 from Past to Present local installation -expensive prerequisites -experienced end- user -MS HPC -web access -costly prerequisites, implementation and management/ maintenance -limited resources -only fire risk -cloud- oriented -web access -more outputs -faster processing -low cost implementation -scalable resources 20

21 The future is hybrid there is a true potential for Scientific Clouds to be sustainable, in the near term in the form of hybrid Clouds, composed of both private/community clouds and public (for example commercial) clouds. The hybrid Cloud could therefore me considered an attractive that brings together the best of the two worlds, rather the tailored-feel of a private/community Cloud and the proven economies of scale of a public Cloud. From the workshop: Towards and EU strategy of cloud computing for government and science Brussels (26/11/2012)

22 A hybrid cloud: The future of computing for research A community cloud for the big e-science applications Evolving current DCI environment into a virtualised serviceoriented computing e-infrastructure (mix of grid-cloud services) A public cloud for the small e-science (or the long tail of e-science applications A centralised pool of resources for small e-science and or cloud-bursting procured centrally from commercial public clouds (pure cloud services) From the workshop: Towards and EU strategy of cloud computing for government and science Brussels (26/11/2012) 22

23 VENUS-C Components used