3rd EGEE User Forum

Grid computing for wildfire danger assessment: porting RISICO in glite

11 Feb 2008, 17:10

20m

Champagne (<a href="http://www.polydome.org">Le Polydôme</a>, Clermont-Ferrand, FRANCE)

Oral Application Porting and Deployment Earth Science

Speaker

Dr Stefano Dal Pra (INFN)

Description

RISICO works on a set partitioned on identical and algorithmically independent squared cells.Computing a cell requires "cell status" and meteo data and produces a "next status" as also the wanted output of the simulation. A RISICO run on the Italian territory with cells of 1 km^2 requires approximatively the computing of 330.000 cells and 150Mb of input data, producing 1Gb of output data in a 20 min of time on a common workstation. Finer simulations using 0.01 km^2 sized cells, leads to quadratically increased input and output data size as also needed computation time. We can afford these higher needs throuhg Grid. We divide a run into a few tens of jobs, each using Storage Elements for input and output data, and the requirement that every job succesfully ends in a given maximum time. This gets achieved thanks to a "job status monitor" program running at UI level which polls about jobs termination, retrieve outputs and resubmits failed or late to finish jobs.

URL for further information:

http://www.cyclops-project.eu/

1. Short overview

The RISICO application, use-case selected by the CYCLOPS project
estimates distribution of wildland fire risk over the Italian
territory helping civil protection agencies to plan the
firefighting system. A short description of RISICO is presented, along
with motivation for the Grid porting of the application. A
submission strategy for both application input data and output
retrieval is considered. A mechanism to ensure automatic resubmission
of eventually failed jobs is also described.

Provide a set of generic keywords that define your contribution (e.g. Data Management, Workflows, High Energy Physics)

Forest fires, Risk Assessment, Civil Protection, Disaster Management

4. Conclusions / Future plans

Tests on a production Grid environment with data from real case
scenario (VO cyclops) leads to satisfying results. Attention must be
paid however to an effective ranking requirements choice in jdl. Up to
now failed or unfinished jobs get resubmitted on provenly fast
queues. Plans are to refine the resubmission strategy in an attempte
to ensure a maximum completion time. A further goal is to integrate
RISICO with geospatial services for input and output data sharing.

3. Impact

The RISICO application running at WN level is a quite straightforfward
rebuild of the original C++ source code, with no need for particular
libraries. A GRisico wrapper script takes care of launching the
executable after downloading three needed input compressed archives:
the list of cells to compute, their status, meteo data for the given
cell-set. The actual Logical File Names are provided through the
InputSandbox. End of job execution gets recognized from our job
status monitor program by polling LFC catalog for output file
existence. This permits to retrieve it earlier than the OutputSandbox,
whose readiness needs official LB answer. After execution ends it
uploads the new computed status and the output as compressed
archived. Time statistics for every step are taken by the wrapper
script and returned through the OutputSandbox. They'll be eventually
useful when verifying the submission strategy.

Presentation materials

Slides

RISICO_GRID_EU08_Clermont.pdf