NCSA NEWS

Addressing Complexity through Synergy

Story posted November 9, 2006

Editorial by
Bob Wilhelmson, Chief Science Officer
NCSA

When I entered graduate school at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s, I was excited about working with a group on the development of Illiac IV, one of the first parallel computers. As I reflect on my experiences since, I recall many surprises, challenges, and successes associated with changes in high-performance architectures, the introduction of cyberenvironments, and advancements in numerical storm models.

The use of increasingly complex models has reproduced -- sometimes with uncanny accuracy -- such phenomena as supercells, with their mesocyclones and tornadoes, as well as severe weather associated with convective lines including bow echoes, severe squall lines, downbursts, and microbursts. Today, computational power has increased to the point that these convective models are being used in forecasting severe weather events. The return on the time and resources that have been spent is impressive, and the promise of more to come is exciting.

The years have also shown me that synergy is a crucial part both of generating simulations of increasing complexity and of exploiting that complexity. Today this not only consists of scientists working together but often consists of computer scientists, application and algorithm researchers, software developers, discipline scientists, service providers, educators, and students. An example is the LEAD (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Research) project funded by NSF involving nine institutions, including NCSA. LEAD is developing a comprehensive national cyberinfrastructure for mesoscale meteorology. It tackles the fundamental information technology research needed to create an integrated, scalable environment for identifying, accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting, managing, analyzing, mining, and visualizing a broad array of meteorological data and model output. In other words, it's building a cyberenvironment -- an integrated, end-to-end system that allows people to coordinate, automate, and apply high-end resources and capabilities.

Accomplishing this task requires a broad set of people, directed at lowering the barrier to using complex weather technologies. By democratizing advanced weather technologies, which traditionally were limited to government and university groups, the environment will empower a growing set of users. This facilitates rapid understanding, experiment, design, and execution of problem-solving simulations by both scientists and educators. The development of cyberenvironments, both within LEAD and at NCSA, encourage this increased human synergy and the increased human understanding that comes with it.

LEAD and NCSA are also focused on human-computer synergy. Efforts in dynamic adaptation are focused on responding automatically and in a coordinated manner to internal and external influences, often requiring on-demand access to computing resources. Dynamic adaptation to the weather includes the ability for numerical models and hazardous weather detection systems to respond to their data, driving new observations and launching new model simulations. Traditionally this been done statically and with much human intervention. Observations are taken in pre-selected patterns and model simulations are made at fixed time intervals and over fixed regions. But hazardous weather doesn't behave in a regular pattern or at regular times. And storm prediction has plenty of other avenues and issues that humans can focus on beyond setting up these simulations.

There have been many advances in individual technologies and model capabilities over the past 40 years that have increased the complexity of our ever-growing knowledge base. The increasing role of synergy in the development of models and cyberenvironments -- along with their use by researchers, developers, forecasters, planners, and policymakers -- enables us and many others in different disciplines to obtain new understanding and to continue to address important societal problems.