Oakridge Top Right
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

IBM Helps Corpus Christi Build a Smarter City


CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas, Dec. 13 -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, today announced they are working together to continuously improve efficiency and sustainability for the city's more than 275,000 residents.

IBM and Corpus Christi are working together to manage and maintain the tens of thousands of assets that make up such diverse city departments such as water and utilities, parks and recreation, as well as solid waste and the storm water department, enabling the city to quickly evaluate and respond to issues, anticipate and prevent problems and improve the quality of life for the citizens of Corpus Christi.

Before working with IBM, each city department had its own process for handling incoming work requests and ongoing maintenance, typically operating on a reactive basis, using paper and logbooks to track issues. Because there wasn't a central systems of tracking existing issues, budgeting and managing city resources was sometimes difficult. IBM software helps Corpus Christi city departments and managers know what is happening across the city, when it is happening and who is handling it across the city in real time.

"Corpus Christi is evolving into a more sustainable city -- one that has intelligence, foresight and accountability built into the way we manage the services we provide our citizens," said Steve Klepper, an administrative superintendent for the city of Corpus Christi. "Working with IBM, we now have a real-time status of city services, automated work orders and an overview of city's infrastructure to better manage our resources, as well as better maintain the city's mission critical assets."

The largest city on the Texas Gulf of Mexico coast, a significant part of the city's economy relies on port industries, higher education and tourism to drive growth. The city strives to improve the quality of life for citizens while keeping operating costs low and maintaining quality levels of service.

Many City Services -- One Call Center

A critical component of the Corpus Christi service strategy is the city-wide "One Call Center." Using IBM software, the Corpus Christi call center can speed responses to issues more efficiently and by better optimizing city resources. For the fiscal year of 2009, the Corpus Christi call centered generated more than 45,000 electronic work order requests from across the city.

When residents call with complaints or service requests, the city creates a work order connected to the location address based on its utility billing system. IBM software provides the city with a bird's-eye automated 'map' view of existing maintenance requests using mapping software from IBM Business Partner Esri. From their desktop, laptop or mobile device, a call center manager can see all existing problems -- coded in color by urgency -- and determine scenarios such as entire service area being affected or the existing location of assigned field workers in order to make management decisions and improve service to customers.

Previously, citizen calls were routed to the appropriate department and recorded on index cards before being manually entered into a spreadsheet. Each utility department used its own separate system and procedures with no citywide standards. Given the manual nature of this process, staff could not accurately track how long it took to respond to and fix problems. Staff had no way to view the work history for each site, making it difficult to identify recurring problems. Although the city had already established a geographic information system (GIS), work orders were not interfaced with this system. As a result, departments couldn't spatially analyze work requests to determine whether a customer request represented a site-specific problem or an area-wide issue that would require more extensive support.

Specifically, IBM software helps the city deliver services in the following areas:

Smarter Water Management

As a coastal town, more than two-thirds of the city's 460 square miles is water. IBM is helping to manage six wastewater treatment plants, two reservoirs, approximately 1,250 miles of wastewater gravity mains and a water treatment plant with a 170 million gallon capacity, helping to ensure safe, clean water to the community while conserving city resources by providing faster and more efficient maintenance.

Urgent requests for critical water work orders that can impact residents, such as pipe main breaks or water quality problems are now received as e-mails on smartphones of designated Water Department first responders. Field crews get real-time work order updates, directly update the work order status using their smartphone and enter work order comments without having to go through a dispatcher. In the field, technicians can access IBM software through their smartphones or tap into the city's WiFi network to update work orders, increasing the time crews can be in the field maintaining the city's assets rather than in the office submitting paperwork.

The software provides analysis into overall water and wastewater projects. In one instance, wastewater staff found that nearly 33 percent of the departments effort was spent resolving problems at just 1.4 percent of customer sites. With this information, the city developed and implemented a repair plan that resolved these ongoing issues and ultimately reduced costs.

Smarter utilities, greener parks and solid waste collection

IBM software is helping better manage the transportation traffic engineering, roads, vehicles, traffic lights, airport -- and parks to improve the quality of life for Corpus Christi citizens.

Working with IBM, all city departments address their work efficiently and more intelligently by providing real-time information, history of prior work, and geographic location. The Solid Waste Department, for example, uses IBM software to keep track of the garbage routes as well as to track customer complaints on garbage. Using laptops connected to the city's wifi system, public utility gas crews in the field can access the exact pipe locations before digging, get a history of repairs in area and update work orders from the field.

Park Maintenance crews track all work performed, or needed, on each of the 300 city parks, ensuring that park lawns are mowed according to target frequencies and maintained according to standards and that public playground facilities are inspected and maintained as needed to provide safe recreational areas. The city-operated airport uses the system to ensure the customer-facing facilities are maintained according to standards and for better inventory control. With more than 1,100 miles of public roads to maintain, the Streets Services Department tracks work performed on streets, including labor and materials costs. Traffic Engineering is able to track locations of citizen complaints and work needed to traffic signals.

Aided with this intelligence, the city can better schedule proactive replacement or maintenance of assets before they break as part of its managed work schedule. This planning allows the city to properly allocate staff and resources in line with urgent or unforeseen circumstances.

The city of Corpus Christi is using IBM Maximo Asset Management software to manage these resources.

About IBM Smarter Cities

For IBM, this marks a new smart city arrangement in the US, which takes a holistic view on improving the basic functions of urban centers. IBM already works with Dubuque, Iowa, and Chesapeake, Va., as smarter cities. IBM has announced an arrangement with the Chinese city of Shenyang to collaborate with government agencies and China's Northeastern University to turn that city into a model for environmental protection and sustainable development. IBM already has many engagements underway with cities around the world focusing on smarter transportation or energy management within cities.

-----

Source: IBM

Sponsored Links

High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.

Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS

May 17, 2013

May 16, 2013

May 15, 2013

May 14, 2013

May 13, 2013

May 10, 2013

May 09, 2013

May 08, 2013

May 07, 2013

May 06, 2013


Cray CS300-LC

Feature Articles

Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede

The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...

"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon

Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...

Supercomputing Vet Champions Quantum Cause

Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...

Short Takes

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...

Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...

Floating Funding to Exascale Island

May 09, 2013 | The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...

HPC and the True Cost of Cloud

May 08, 2013 | For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution

In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.

Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video

The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.

SC12 Editorial Feature HPCwire Soundbite sponsored by ISC

HPC Job Bank


Featured Events


  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States





HPCwire Events