One of the major scientific challenges and societal concerns is to make informed decisions to ensure sustainable groundwater availability when facing deep uncertainties.A major computational requirement associated wit...One of the major scientific challenges and societal concerns is to make informed decisions to ensure sustainable groundwater availability when facing deep uncertainties.A major computational requirement associated with this is on-demand computing for risk analysis to support timely decision.This paper presents a scientific modeling service called‘ModflowOnAzure’which enables large-scale ensemble runs of groundwater flow models to be easily executed in parallel in the Windows Azure cloud.Several technical issues were addressed,including the conjunctive use of desktop tools in MATLAB to avoid license issues in the cloud,integration of Dropbox with Azure for improved usability and‘Drop-and-Compute,’and automated file exchanges between desktop and the cloud.Two scientific use cases are presented in this paper using this service with significant computational speedup.One case is from Arizona,where six plausible alternative conceptual models and a streamflow stochastic model are used to evaluate the impacts of different groundwater pumping scenarios.Another case is from Texas,where a global sensitivity analysis is performed on a regional groundwater availability model.Results of both cases show informed uncertainty analysis results that can be used to assist the groundwater planning and sustainability study.展开更多
Global challenges(such as economy and natural hazards)and technology advancements have triggered international leaders and organizations to rethink geosciences and Digital Earth in the new decade.The next generation v...Global challenges(such as economy and natural hazards)and technology advancements have triggered international leaders and organizations to rethink geosciences and Digital Earth in the new decade.The next generation visions pose grand challenges for infrastructure,especially computing infrastructure.The gradual establishment of cloud computing as a primary infrastructure provides new capabilities to meet the challenges.This paper reviews research conducted using cloud computing to address geoscience and Digital Earth needs within the context of an integrated Earth system.We also introduce the five papers selected through a rigorous review process as exemplar research in using cloud capabilities to address the challenges.The literature and research demonstrate that spatial cloud computing provides unprecedented new capabilities to enable Digital Earth and geosciences in the twenty-first century in several aspects:(1)virtually unlimited computing power for addressing big data storage,sharing,processing,and knowledge discovering challenges,(2)elastic,flexible,and easy-to-use computing infrastructure to facilitate the building of the next generation geospatial cyberin-frastructure,CyberGIS,CloudGIS,and Digital Earth,(3)seamless integration environment that enables mashing up observation,data,models,problems,and citizens,(4)research opportunities triggered by global challenges that may lead to breakthroughs in relevant fields including infrastructure building,GIScience,computer science,and geosciences,and(5)collaboration supported by cloud computing and across science domains,agencies,countries to collectively address global challenges from policy,management,system engineering,acquisition,and operation aspects.展开更多
文摘One of the major scientific challenges and societal concerns is to make informed decisions to ensure sustainable groundwater availability when facing deep uncertainties.A major computational requirement associated with this is on-demand computing for risk analysis to support timely decision.This paper presents a scientific modeling service called‘ModflowOnAzure’which enables large-scale ensemble runs of groundwater flow models to be easily executed in parallel in the Windows Azure cloud.Several technical issues were addressed,including the conjunctive use of desktop tools in MATLAB to avoid license issues in the cloud,integration of Dropbox with Azure for improved usability and‘Drop-and-Compute,’and automated file exchanges between desktop and the cloud.Two scientific use cases are presented in this paper using this service with significant computational speedup.One case is from Arizona,where six plausible alternative conceptual models and a streamflow stochastic model are used to evaluate the impacts of different groundwater pumping scenarios.Another case is from Texas,where a global sensitivity analysis is performed on a regional groundwater availability model.Results of both cases show informed uncertainty analysis results that can be used to assist the groundwater planning and sustainability study.
基金Research is supported by State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs(20120464001)NSF(IIP-1160979 and CNS-1117300)+1 种基金FGDC(GeoCloud and GEOSS Clearinghouse)Microsoft Research.
文摘Global challenges(such as economy and natural hazards)and technology advancements have triggered international leaders and organizations to rethink geosciences and Digital Earth in the new decade.The next generation visions pose grand challenges for infrastructure,especially computing infrastructure.The gradual establishment of cloud computing as a primary infrastructure provides new capabilities to meet the challenges.This paper reviews research conducted using cloud computing to address geoscience and Digital Earth needs within the context of an integrated Earth system.We also introduce the five papers selected through a rigorous review process as exemplar research in using cloud capabilities to address the challenges.The literature and research demonstrate that spatial cloud computing provides unprecedented new capabilities to enable Digital Earth and geosciences in the twenty-first century in several aspects:(1)virtually unlimited computing power for addressing big data storage,sharing,processing,and knowledge discovering challenges,(2)elastic,flexible,and easy-to-use computing infrastructure to facilitate the building of the next generation geospatial cyberin-frastructure,CyberGIS,CloudGIS,and Digital Earth,(3)seamless integration environment that enables mashing up observation,data,models,problems,and citizens,(4)research opportunities triggered by global challenges that may lead to breakthroughs in relevant fields including infrastructure building,GIScience,computer science,and geosciences,and(5)collaboration supported by cloud computing and across science domains,agencies,countries to collectively address global challenges from policy,management,system engineering,acquisition,and operation aspects.
