Modeling and implementing an earthquake and tsunami event-triggered, time-constrained impact assessment workflow

Disaster warning and emergency response are an emerging field of HPC/cloud computing which is now known as urgent computing. This means that computing is required to be performed within short time scales. In this regard, the timeliness for early warning of the population is the foremost important point well before accuracy, as long as the predictions are sufficiently accurate, hence a coarser level of precision is acceptable to that end. It also processes a large amount of data and provides well-targeted, high-resolution, and highly reliable information to emergency management stakeholders. At an early stage, it is also important to take into account the uncertainties surrounding the disaster parameters. To do this, the simulation process must include a range of possible values for each of the main input parameters. Following this principle, we hereby present an impact assessment workflow that is designed to provide building-specific damage assessments caused by earthquakes and possible subsequent tsunamis. We target short run-times to guarantee that results are provided as needed for emergency response decisions and that a proper impact assessment is provided, allowing for meaningful planning of rescue actions. We show the design principles coming from a time-aware model of computation, to the specification of the workflow, and the individual programs that compose it. A working prototype was developed as part of the LEXIS project. This paper also includes preliminary experiments toward robust urgent computing, utilizing distributed, heterogeneous HPC and cloud infrastructures.