Report on raising public awareness and participation (Deliverable D20)

The purpose of this document is to present actions taken during the Cyclops project lifetime in order to raise public awareness and participation, as well as the outcomes of these actions. Dissemination and outreach have always been considered key points for accomplishing this, ever since the project planning phases. The actions are generally framed in the Work Package devoted to dissemination (WP5), although some of them may well be regarded as a horizontal action of the project

A WCS-based approach to integrate satellite imagery data in wildfire simulation

This paper describes the integration of multi-dimensional data from satellite sensors in a Civil Protection application that simulates fire spread. The approach uses standard Web Coverage Services from OGC to fetch and process land cover and recently burned areas, available in the form of satellite imagery data previously captured by the MODIS sensor, to automatically generate renovated fuel maps. The proposed architecture is based on rasdaman, a domain-independent database management system (DBMS) that offers a suite of WCS services on top of the DBMS. In the current work we extended rasdaman with facilities to: (i) insert and retrieve multi-layer coverages from WCS, (ii) support new formats, such as HDF, adequate for satellite imagery and multi-layer files, and (iii) support Coordinate Reference Systems. We also demonstrate that it is feasible to use MODIS datasets to automatically compute valuable and regularly updated fuel maps, used as input of fire spread simulations. The results also show that in spite of using inexpensive general and low resolution (500m) MODIS maps, we obtained quite acceptable results when compared with the static ones, which are tailored and higher resolution (80m).Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Mid-Term Project Workshop (Deliverable D12)

This document is intended to provide a report of the Mid-Term Project Workshop. The Conference was fully integrated within the 2nd Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference, held in Oporto on 12th – 14th May, 2008, at FEUP, Faculdade de Engenharia de Universidade de Porto.FP

D19 final plan for using and disseminating knowledge

This document presents the Final Plan for Using and Disseminating Knowledge acquired throughout the development of the CYCLOPS project as deliverable D19. It includes a description of the main achievements in disseminating knowledge, and the consortium and each participant’s plans for the exploitation of the results for the consortium as a whole, or for individual participants or groups of participants. It updates the Plan for Using and Disseminating Knowledge that was presented as Deliverable D4 and describes the final dissemination plan of the CYCLOPS project. This deliverable provides a strategy aimed at addressing various target communities in order to achieve the project dissemination and exploitation goals. After an update of the dissemination instruments employed, the deliverable focuses on the description of the dissemination activities carried out. In addition to the normal dissemination and exploitation of the work through scientific journals and professional bodies, Civil Protection Community will be specifically targeted for dissemination of the CYCLOPS deliverables, and their future exploitation of the results. Other written deliverables focus on presenting dissemination activities in specific subject areas. In particular deliverable D17 reports “the results of the dissemination of EGEE towards the Civil Protection community, and about the coordination between the EGEE and CYCLOPS activities”, deliverable D18 focuses on “collecting the CYCLOPS project results for dissemination towards different interested audiences such as Grid communities, other Civil protection agencies, but also national and international initiative and projects, SMEs, etc.” and deliverable D20 that reports “the extent to which actors beyond the research community have been involved to help spread awareness and to explore the wider societal implications of the proposed work

A geographical information system for wild fire management

he CROSS-Fire project focus on developing a grid-based framework for wild fire management using FireStation (FS) as a standalone application that simulates the fire spread over complex topography. The overall software development is made of several components: client applications, which request geo-referenced data and fire spread simulation, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI), which provide geo-referenced data, and the GRID, which gives support to the computational and data storage requirements. Herein we present the central WPS (Web Processing System) layer developed to support the interaction between all components of the architecture. This OGC-WS compatible layer provides the mechanism to access the grid facilities for processing and data management and including all the algorithms, calculation, or model that operates on spatially referenced data, also mediating communication with the FS console. We also describe the work that has been done to provide FS with dynamic fuel maps, by using an OGC-WCS suite of services and satellite data. This task complements the previous integration of dynamic data from meteorological stations using OGC-SWE services

Running user-provided virtual machines in batch-oriented computing clusters

The use of virtualization in HPC clusters can provide rich software environments, application isolation and efficient workload management mechanisms, but system-level virtualization introduces a software layer on the computing nodes that reduces performance and inhibits the direct use of hardware devices. We propose an unobtrusive user-level platform that allows the execution of virtual machines inside batch jobs without limiting the computing cluster’s ability to execute the most demanding applications. A per-user platform uses a static mode in which the VMs run entirely using the resources of a single batch job and a dynamic mode in which the VMs navigate at runtime between the continuously allocated jobs node time-slots. A dynamic mode is introduced to build complex scenarios with several VMs for personalized HPC environments or persistent services such as databases or web services based applications. Fault-tolerant system agents, integrated using group communication primitives, control the system and execute user commands and automatic scheduling decisions made by an optional monitoring function. The performance of compute intensive applications running on our system suffers negligible overhead compared to the native configuration. The performance of distributed applications is dependent on their communication patterns as the user-mode network overlay introduces a relevant communication overhead.FC

G-fire station : fire simulation from desktop to grid

CROSS-Fire is a research project, funded by the Portuguese NGI and led by UMinho, and focused on topics related to decision making to control forest fires and on the porting to the grid of FireStation - a fire growth simulation application. G-FireStation exploits Grid capabilities in order to have a faster execution, to manage large data input/output files, to create a large data base of simulation results and to allow the interactive control of the simulations through a graphical user interfaceFC

An OGC/SOS conformant client to manage geospatial data on the GRID

This paper describes a Sensor Observation Service (SOS) client developed to integrate dynamic geospatial data from meteorological sensors, on a grid-based risk management decision support system. The present work is part of the CROSS-Fire project, which uses forest fires as the main case study and the FireStation application to simulate fire spread. The meteorological data is accessed through the SOS standard from Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), using the Observations and Measurements (O&M) standard encoding format. Since the SOS standard was not designed to directly access sensors, we developed an interface application to load the SOS database with observations from a Vantis Weather Station (WS). To integrate the SOS meteorological data into the FireStation, the developed SOS client was embedded on a Web Processing Service (WPS) algorithm. This algorithm was designed to be functional and fully compliant with SOS, SensorML, and O&M standards from OGC. With minor modifications to the developed SOS database interface, the SOS client works with any WS. This client supports spatial and temporal filters, including the integration of dynamic data from satellites into FireStation, as described.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

PlaCoR: plataforma para a computação orientada ao recurso

Artigo desenvolvido no âmbito da dissertação de Mestrado: PlaCoR - Plataforma para a Computação orientada ao Recurso, Bruno Ribeiro, Departamento de Informática, UMinho Abril, 2019A Plataforma para a Computação orientada ao Recurso (Pla- CoR) foi desenhada como um ambiente de programação e execução de aplicações baseadas no modelo da computação orientada ao recurso (CoR), integralmente escrito em C++ Moderno. A plataforma possui facilidades para: i) comunicação inter-domínios, ii) passagem de mensagens entre recursos comunicantes, iii) memória parti- lhada distribuída (DSM), iv) ativação remota de fios de execução (RPC), v) criação e gestão de recursos e vi) gestão da consistência entre todas as réplicas de um recurso. Atualmente, o desenho de aplicações CoR assenta nos recursos: domínio, grupo, clausura, agente, proto-agente, dado, barreira, guarda e guarda para leituras/escritas. A avaliação da plataforma tomou como exemplo a leitura e processa- mento de eventos registados em TTree, recorrentemente usados na expe- riência ATLAS. O experimento confirmou a viabilidade da orientação ao recurso como paradigma de programação híbrido que integra múltiplos fios de execução e sincronização distribuída, com facilidades de comuni- cação de grão fino para a passagem de mensagens e de comunicação em contextos seguros, o acesso remoto a memória e a ativação remota de agentes