DEVELOPER TOOLS

CHAMPAIGN, ILL.—The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced that $11.25 million has been awarded to a project that will improve researchers' ability to study and predict dangerous weather. The NSF Information Technology Research grant will support the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project (http://lead.ou.edu), in which the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will collaborate with the University of Illinois and seven other institutions. "Each year severe weather causes hundreds of deaths across the United States and costs billions of dollars," NCSA Director Dan Reed said. "LEAD will give weather researchers the robust, flexible cyberinfrastructure they need to better understand and better predict these destructive events." LEAD will allow researchers, educators, and students to run atmospheric models and other tools in much more realistic, real-time settings than is now possible. "Our ultimate goal is to create a system that takes full advantage of all the atmospheric data that is constantly being collected, the power of supercomputers, and the speed of high-performance networks," said Bob Wilhelmson, a senior research scientist at NCSA and a co-principal investigator with LEAD. "Being able to analyze this data in real-time and constantly update our models and forecasts could help us pinpoint where a tornado is likely to occur or where a hurricane will hit land." Currently, weather forecasting models typically run on fixed schedules over fixed regions, regardless of weather conditions. The LEAD project will develop grid computing environments for on-demand detection, simulation, and prediction of thunderstorms, tornadoes, and other destructive weather. With LEAD, users will be able to access, manage, analyze, and display data; their desktop computers will connect them to a broad array of tools and to national databases. Dynamic orchestration tools will allow the system to automatically respond to evolving weather by ingesting data at the most crucial times. For example, a better understanding of the conditions that create tornadoes could lead to improved prediction and more timely, accurate warnings, saving lives and reducing the economic toll of these severe storms. A researcher pursuing this goal could use the LEAD portal to access and sort years of data stored in national databases. This culled data could be stored at distributed sites—including NCSA—where the LEAD components will be developed and tested. Data assimilation and data mining tools could then be used to further refine and categorize the information. Based on the data, the researcher will be able to develop hundreds of numerical simulations of storms to understand in more detail why some storms produce tornadoes and some do not. Using data mining tools, the researcher will be able to sift the hundreds of terabytes of output from these simulations, rapidly gaining insight into the conditions that are most likely to produce tornadoes. Ultimately, the researcher will be able to move beyond simulations based on historical data to running real-time forecasts with streaming data feeds. The LEAD system will enable identification of thunderstorms as they form, automatically triggering data-gathering tools, requesting grid computing resources, and generating results as the weather unfolds. NCSA will integrate the components of LEAD as they are developed at various institutions and is also one of five sites acting as a grid- and web-service testbed. The plan is for LEAD's features to be tested and rolled out in three phases over five years. LEAD's principal investigator is Kelvin Drogemeier at the University of Oklahoma, a long-time NCSA collaborator. The other institutions collaborating on LEAD are Colorado State University, Howard University, Indiana University, Millersville University, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. NCSA's Reed is also a key researcher on another project that received an $8.25 million ITR grant. The goal of the virtual grid application development software (VGrADS) project is to develop software to simplify and accelerate the development of grid applications and services. The LEAD project is one of the collaborative application targets of the VGrADS effort. For more on this year's ITR grant recipients, see http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr03103.htm. For more information on the grant program, see http://www.itr.nsf.gov/.