HPCwire: Digital Eyes in the Sky Aid San Diego Firefighters

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

November 02, 2007

Digital Eyes in the Sky Aid San Diego Firefighters

While staff evacuated, innovative local wireless network provided real-time images of the fires

Oct. 30 -- Video and still images captured in real time have informed fire crews and local residents in the San Diego area about the location and severity of threats to life and property since fires broke out earlier this month. Accident investigators from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) have requested these images that were captured by the National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN).

Perched on mountains and bluffs overlooking the greater San Diego area, HPWREN's remote cameras have served as constant eyes in the sky, even as fires engulfed the towers on which they stood, making the situation too hazardous for human observers. These real-time cameras provide CAL FIRE and other local fire crews with a commanding view of fires as they happen, confirming fire situations on remote mountaintops saving valuable time and personnel.

Hans-Werner Braun, director of HPWREN at the University of California, San Diego, whose own family was forced to evacuate, continues to monitor the network's cameras to watch workers extinguish the fire.

"The HPWREN real-time cameras tell us what is happening before engines or chiefs can get there," says CAL FIRE Emergency Command Center Chief Tom Gardner. "They tell us clearly where to go when we are getting swamped with locals calling it in."

Chris Hinshaw, manager of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's wireless communications office, further described the cameras' contributions as "especially helpful as they are set up with a 360-degree view from each site in small thumbnails so you can browse quickly. We were also able to estimate potential damage to our radio site by observing the fire as it moved through the facilities, and observe remedial actions such as fuel deliveries for our generators using the cameras. They are a force multiplier for us."

In addition to CAL FIRE, rural communities in the greater San Diego area created blogs that point residents to HPWREN cameras, enabling residents to check the whereabouts of blazes and acquire related information not otherwise available from traditional media.

The Lyon's Peak cameras have been especially useful for people in the Jamul community, who monitored camera footage through their neighborhood blog.

"I've heard from many Jamulians about the cameras, all with basically the same message: the cameras were what kept them sane. They were the only reliable source of information about where the fire was burning," said local resident Tom Dilatus. "It was extremely comforting to see the tiny stationary lights of what we guessed were fire engines stationed along Sierra Cielo and the dirt road to the east of our property as the flames came through last night. At least we knew that the necessary forces had been deployed."

The goal of the HPWREN project is to demonstrate and evaluate a non-commercial, prototype, high-performance, wide-area wireless network in San Diego and Riverside counties. The network includes backbone nodes on the San Diego Supercomputer Center and San Diego State campuses and a number of hard-to-reach areas in remote environments. It hosts the HPWREN servers and provides for its Internet connectivity, supporting the access to the camera images fore more than 10,000 users during the fires, at more than 10 gigabytes a day. On Oct. 25, downloads from one server alone added up to more than 70 gigabytes of data.

In addition to assisting state and local authorities with wireless networking technologies during emergencies, HPWREN is used for network analysis research and provides high-speed Internet access to field researchers in geophysics, astronomy and ecology as well as educational opportunities for rural Native American learning centers and schools.

For background information about a newly established regional command and control communications network and HPWREN's involvement, visit http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/20070531/.

About NSF

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of $5.92 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to over 1,700 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 42,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 10,000 new funding awards. The NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly. For more information, visit http://www.nsf.gov.

-----

Source: NSF

Article Tools

Share & Save Options

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

UPenn adds third state to nanowire storage; and UIUC is named the first CUDA Center of Excellence. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

IBM Looks to Tap Massive Data Streams

Modern civilization is positively drenched in data, some of which needs to be dealt with in real time to be of any value. Businesses, especially in the financial industry, have long recognized this, and have been building custom systems to collect, analyze, and react to information as it is captured. IBM thinks the time is right to generalize these approaches into a new field of computing -- and a new business -- it calls stream computing.
Read More...

Gravity Attracts a GigE HPC Cluster

Not all supercomputing rides on InfiniBand or proprietary interconnects. For technical applications that decompose neatly into loosely-coupled threads, a big cluster with vanilla Gigabit Ethernet does just fine. The top Ethernet system on the TOP500 list -- at number 58 -- is the new ATLAS cluster at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

San Diego Gets Set for Storage Explosion

Jul 03 | Byte and Switch | The San Diego Supercomputer Center, which provides much of the core storage for the TeraGrid, is overhauling its 28 petabyte storage system to support tremendous data growth. Read more...

Intel's Gelsinger Predicts Intel Inside Everything

Jul 03 | ExtremeTech | Intel exec Pat Gelsinger said he sees the Intel Architecture permeating virtually every segment of computing, as the company's microprocessors expand into more and more cores. Read more...

A Massively Parallel Future

Jul 03 | Bangkok Post | The latest programmable GPUs are starting to steal application cycles from CPUs. Read more...

UCSD Researchers Identify Potential Bird Flu Drugs

Jul 02 | UC San Diego News Center | With the help of resources at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD scientists have isolated more than two dozen promising compounds from which new “designer drugs” might be developed to combat the avian flu virus. Read more...

Implementing Multi-Core: The Devil Is in the Detail

Jul 02 | Chip Design Magazine | Dual- and quad-core processors barely scratch the surface of the potential of multi-core systems. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

New HPC White Paper: Star-P® Performance on IBM Linux Clusters

Jul 03 | | The paper explores some of the performance benefits of Star-P on commodity scalable systems such as IBM's Linux clusters based on multi-core Intel Xeon processors. The results demonstrate substantial performance gains with almost no programmer effort-roughly a 24-fold speed improvement for solving linear matrix equations. An overview of parallel computing with Star-P, a description of the performance test cases and description of IBM cluster configurations used for testing are also addressed.

Fast N-Body Simulation with CUDA C Compiler

Apr 17 | | An N-body simulation numerically approximates the evolution of a system of bodies in which each body continuously interacts with every other body, and it arises in many other computational science problems as well.

Improving Performance and Manageability for Seismic Processing and Imaging Applications with Parallel Storage

Jun 05 | | As pressure increases on the upstream seismic processing community to deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation of storage solutions will be required that allow the maximum utilisation of high-performance computing (HPC) Linux cluster resources, together with the minimum of management overhead.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Podcast: Interview with Ben Bennett of ClearSpeed Technology

Today, HPC organizations are requiring substantially more floating point performance to solve real-world problems. In this podcast, Ben Bennett, ClearSpeed General Manager, discusses how acceleration technology can improve the overall performance of standard x86-based systems...