![]() ![]() Migrating it to the cloud, Massey says, will provide greater access and enable the Army Corps to more easily share data that is currently stored on highly secured supercomputers. (Courtesy of USACE)ĬSTORM is also used by other government agencies and academic researchers. CSTORM is a key tool in helping the Army Corps build flood-risk management infrastructure such as seawalls, dikes and levees. “If you’re building a levee that goes 10, 20 miles or so and you’ve got to have an error tolerance on how high that levee is, you’re talking millions of dollars if you’ve got to build it higher,” Massey says. If storm modeling is restricted for lack of supercomputing resources, Massey says, that could result in costly infrastructure overbuilds to allow for the needed safety margins. The system is also used to inform planning during hurricanes and other extreme weather events. The data it provides can help determine, for example, where to build a levee and whether putting it in one location could lead to flooding elsewhere. “Just because one person or one group suddenly has a big need doesn’t mean everybody else’s need goes away.”ĬSTORM, which Massey helped develop, is a key tool in helping the Army Corps plan for and build flood-risk management infrastructure such as seawalls, dikes and levees. “You’ve got lots of scientists and decision-makers running models and simulations on these supercomputers, and all of them have varying levels of importance,” says Massey, who works in the ERDC’s Coastal & Hydraulics Laboratory in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The hope, Massey says, is that running CSTORM on Azure Government can help alleviate the demand on DOD supercomputers, which can lead to lengthy wait times, missed deadlines or having to restrict studies with tight deadlines – for example, storm modeling during a hurricane. “It’s a massive amount of computational hours that go into these simulations,” says Chris Massey, an ERDC research mathematician who led the modeling project. Virgin Islands, required running several HPCMP supercomputers continuously for about three months and used a staggering 240 million hours of computer processing. The project, which used CSTORM to model some 2,300 synthetic storms over a huge geographic area including Puerto Rico and the U.S. ERDC Research Mathematician Chris Massey, who helped develop CSTORM. The ERDC’s growing need for computing power was underscored last year, when the center wrapped up the largest study of its type to date – an analysis of how future storms and natural disasters could impact communities along the U.S. The project will involve running CSTORM on Azure Government and exploring the possibility of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed data collection and gain new insights. ![]() The initiative was started as a cloud computing pilot project under the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) and then received a grant from Microsoft’s AI for Earth program. Army Corps Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) is partnering with Microsoft to use cloud computing to improve its coastal ocean modeling and better enable data-sharing. Department of Defense supercomputers with a range of other projects, from COVID-19 modeling to military analyses. But using the system means the Army Corps must compete for limited time on U.S. ![]() The initiative is an example of CSTORM’s growing importance for assessing storm risks to coastal communities. The authority will use the Corps’ premier storm modeling system, CSTORM-MS, to study the possibility of harmful seawater surges up the Mississippi River, a major economic driver for the region, during a hurricane or major storm. Informing those decisions is the goal of a project underway between the Louisiana authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ premier storm modeling system, CSTORM, uses physics-based models to simulate coastal storms and assess risks to communities. “We need to make the best decisions that we can make, considering the huge amount of scientific uncertainty about what might happen here in the future.” The U.S. “Any time folks have to evacuate, it costs money, and Louisiana is not a rich state. “Storm modeling becomes more important every year with all the hurricanes that Louisiana has been exposed to,” she says. Search Search /transform/Īfter almost two decades of working on coastal protection and restoration efforts in Louisiana, Carol Parsons Richards knows all too well the destruction hurricanes can cause.Ī coastal resources scientist manager for the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, Richards also realizes how critical storm modeling is to help prepare for a future made unpredictable by climate change. ![]()
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