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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
NEW GRID DESKTOP TOOL MAKING FLOOD
PREDICTION EASIER
A new tool developed under the IST CROSSGRID project aims to make running
applications over the distributed computing environment of the Grid even
easier. It currently is being used to help predict flooding across Europe.
Led by the Polish supercomputing institute Cyfronet, 21 partners in 11
countries across Europe are working to extend the Grid environment to a new
category of practical applications. One of the key tools they have developed
is the migration desktop, which is designed to support easy integration of
these applications with the Grid environment.
"The migration desktop is a service that allows you to define the
environment
for easy integration of your application," said project coordinator Michal
Turala of Cyfronet. "It's a kind of user-friendly interface for whatever
application you want to use."
Now a working prototype running in a Linux environment, the migration
desktop
is being further refined in preparation for the close of the project in
February 2005. The desktop already is used to manage a new breed of
distributed computing applications that the Grid infrastructure makes possible
-- in biomedics, in flood prevention, in pollution forecasting and in
computation-heavy physics.
Flood Prediction An Urgent Need
The flood prevention application is typical of these new distributed
computing
areas. It is a kind of virtual workgroup that uses CROSSGRID services to
connect together the experts, data and processing resources needed to support
fast decision-making in flooding crises.
The application's main component is a highly automated flood warning
system,
based on data such as rainfall, snowmelt runoff and topographical variations.
Predicting likely flooding requires extensive processing resources to carry
out the meteorological simulation required, as well as handling the data from
satellite sensing, hydraulic water flow models and more.
The project's work in this area has acquired a new urgency since the severe
flooding that devastated many parts of central Europe in August 2002. Tens of
thousands had to be evacuated from their homes in six countries, and German
officials have estimated that repairing the damage will cost billions of
euros.
"The migration desktop is the tool that integrates the work of all the
researchers across Europe working on this flood prevention application," said
Turala. "It helps us integrate all the different data used in the flood
prevention system, and runs it on the Grid."
** This article originally appeared on the IST Results Web site, which can be found at http://istresults.cordis.lu/
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