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A group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers planners, policymakers, interest groups and citizens a glimpse of the future, using a computational model to simulate land-use change.
If a new road is built, how will the flow of traffic in the city change? Will businesses and people be drawn to the new thoroughfare, and if so will this represent economic development or simply migration from other areas of the city? If the road sparks residential growth, how will city services meet the challenge? Will schools and fire stations need to be built in the area? How will growth affect water quality, wildlife habitat, and other environmental factors? These questions and many others like them whirl in the brains of government officials and urban planners as they try to make the best decisions for their communities. How can they possibly foresee the impact their choices will have a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years, and even 50 years into the future? It’s a challenge that would stump a crystal ball. A group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to offer decision makers just such a glimpse of the future, however, not with a crystal ball but with a computational model that simulates land-use change across space and over time. Planners, policymakers, interest groups and laypeople can use Land-use Evolution and Impact Assessment Model (LEAM) to visualize and test the impact of policy decisions. The computationally intensive simulations have leveraged the power of NCSA’s high-performance computing systems, and the LEAM group relies on NCSA’s 3-petabyte mass storage system to store the vast quantities of data generated by the simulations.
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