Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering

Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science, engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie

Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF): Indiana-Purdue Grid (IP-Grid)

NSF Award ID: ACI-0338618 Project Dates: 10/1/03-9/30/0

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

Integrating multiple clusters for compute-intensive applications

Multicluster grids provide one promising solution to satisfying the growing computational demands of compute-intensive applications. However, it is challenging to seamlessly integrate all participating clusters in different domains into a single virtual computational platform. In order to fully utilize the capabilities of multicluster grids, computer scientists need to deal with the issue of joining together participating autonomic systems practically and efficiently to execute grid-enabled applications. Driven by several compute-intensive applications, this theses develops a multicluster grid management toolkit called Pelecanus to bridge the gap between user\u27s needs and the system\u27s heterogeneity. Application scientists will be able to conduct very large-scale execution across multiclusters with transparent QoS assurance. A novel model called DA-TC (Dynamic Assignment with Task Containers) is developed and is integrated into Pelecanus. This model uses the concept of a task container that allows one to decouple resource allocation from resource binding. It employs static load balancing for task container distribution and dynamic load balancing for task assignment. The slowest resources become useful rather than be bottlenecks in this manner. A cluster abstraction is implemented, which not only provides various cluster information for the DA-TC execution model, but also can be used as a standalone toolkit to monitor and evaluate the clusters\u27 functionality and performance. The performance of the proposed DA-TC model is evaluated both theoretically and experimentally. Results demonstrate the importance of reducing queuing time in decreasing the total turnaround time for an application. Experiments were conducted to understand the performance of various aspects of the DA-TC model. Experiments showed that our model could significantly reduce turnaround time and increase resource utilization for our targeted application scenarios. Four applications are implemented as case studies to determine the applicability of the DA-TC model. In each case the turnaround time is greatly reduced, which demonstrates that the DA-TC model is efficient for assisting application scientists in conducting their research. In addition, virtual resources were integrated into the DA-TC model for application execution. Experiments show that the execution model proposed in this thesis can work seamlessly with multiple hybrid grid/cloud resources to achieve reduced turnaround time

CIRA annual report FY 2017/2018

Reporting period April 1, 2017-March 31, 2018

Modeling Alternatives Sustainable-Energy-Policy for the Supply Chain of Wind Power in Brazil.

Renewable energy studies have received high attention in the last few years due the increasing deployment of alternatives such as wind, solar and biomass, as a result of the urgency in reducing fossil fuels consumption. This situation has involved an important challenge for long-term renewables policy and energy system planning. Brazil is the richest country in terms of renewable sources in Latin American. Brazil has energy generation portfolio not much different form the Colombia one, and the understanding of this very important country will contribute to inspire other countries in the region, particularly Colombia. Since 2004 the Brazilian energy policy promotes wind power development aimed at complementing hydropower generation. Despite the energy policies adopted in Brazil, the supply chain of wind power has experienced barriers that include: insufficient transmission lines and the delays in energy projects caused by lack synchronic among the energy policies. Thus, the unsynchronised energy policy has affected the performance of renewable energy supply chain, which has produced an impact on the electricity market. This thesis addresses these issues by evaluating alternative sustainable energy-policy, which must reflect new institutional guidelines to support wind power penetration and their dynamics performance in supply chain

CIRA annual report FY 2016/2017

Reporting period April 1, 2016-March 31, 2017