D. Andresen, M. Neilsen, G. Singh, and P. Kalita (USA)
distributed computing, hydrology, watershed, XML
The DHARMA domain-specific middleware system is intended to allow hydrologic field engineers to tackle water-management problems on a scale previously im possible without sophisticated computational manage ment systems. DHARMA provides automatic data acquisition via the Internet; data fusion from online, local, and cached resources; smart caching of inter mediate results; parallel process execution; automatic transformation and piping of data between different hydrologic simulation models; and interfaces with ex isting metacomputing systems. Our target watershed model, WEPP, is limited to very small watersheds with current computer technology. A revolutionary change in hydrologic modeling on the watershed scale is being brought about by applying various watershed models to large watersheds, such as the Lake Decatur Water shed which covers 925 square miles. Even with unlimited hardware, the current version of WEPP can not be applied directly to the Lake Decatur Watershed because WEPP is limited to a maximum of 75 hillslopes. To address this issue, we have inte grated support for heterogeneous simulation models in our software; for example, we can use WEPP to model individual hillslopes and SITES to model the connect ing channels (reaches) and dams structures, playing to the strengths of both models. In this paper, we discuss the evolving software archi tecture of DHARMA and its interaction with the clus ter and Grid infrastructures. We also present experi mental results showing the performance of DHARMA using Globus over three Beowulf clusters.
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