FireStation: from sequential to EGEE-Grid

Abstract

Herein we report the work carried out to port FireStation (FS), a fire growth simulation application, from the Desktop to a Grid environment. The objectives of work were to exploit Grid capabilities, in order: i) to speed up the execution, ii) to manage large data input/output files, iii) to allow an interactive monitoring and control of the fire growth and iv) to create and manipulate a database of inputs/outputs of multiple simulations to permit evaluation of the of the simulations ́ conditions/results. We started by the development of P-FS, a parallel version of FireStation, using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) to benefit from the inherent parallel environment offered by clusters ,existing at each of the sites of the EGEE, also taking advantage of MPI parallel I/O facilities to reduce the overall time needed to process the huge volumes of data. Next, we decided to extend the P-FS version of the simulator with several currently available Grid tools and services, such as: the LFC catalog to easy the location, access and transfer of data; the AMGA metadata catalog to create a database of previous executions and respective results; and finally the WatchDog tool, to monitor and to provide data for the interactive control of the running simulations. Both the parallel and the Grid version were implemented successfully showing that Grid can give a good response to a parallel application, with large input output demands, allowing for soft real time monitoring and keeping track of the already computed simulations, through a Grid oriented large meta database. Now that G-Firestation has been integrated within the Grid Framework we plan to develop a complete graphical interface that mimics the original desktop environment. We also plan to exploit the potential of the Grid portal technology, in particular Genius, to allow fine control to the access of the simulator. Finally, we need to enable geospatial services already been implemented in the context of other EGEE projects for data access and processing: such as OGC WCS and OGC WPS.