Implementing a Grid/Cloud eScience Infrastructure for Hydrological Sciences

Abstract

The objective of this chapter is to describe building an eScience infrastructure suitable for use with environmental sciences and especially with hydrological science applications. The infrastructure allows a wide range of hydrological problems to be investigated and is particularly suitable for either computationally intensive or multiple scenario applications. To accomplish this objective, this research discovered the shortcomings of current grid infrastructures for hydrological science and developed missing components to fill this gap. In particular, there were three primary areas which needed work: first, integrating data and computing grids; second, visualization of geographic information from grid outputs; and third, implementing hydrological simulations based on this infrastructure. This chapter focuses on the first area, which is focusing on grid infrastructure system integration and development. A grid infrastructure, which consists of a computing and a data grid, has been built. In addition, the computing grid has been extended to utilize the Amazon EC2 cloud computing resources. Users can conduct a complete simulation job life cycle from job submission, and data management to metadata management based on the tools available in the infrastructure.