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production of more effective quantitative rainfall predictions for severe meteo-
rological events;
Experiment suite 2, takes the output from NWP executions to produce discharge
data from drainage;
Experiment suite 3, driven by the data produced by experiment suite 2, com-
pletes the model chain by adding water level, flow, and impact.
approach: the hydrometeorological
scientists not only access the DRIHM e-infrastructure to carry out HMR activities,
but they work with ICT researchers to drive the development of all the necessary
tools and practices, allowing them to effectively exploit the available resources.
DRIHM is following a
“
learning by doing
”
17.4.1 A Brief Description of the DRIHM Science Gateway
The most important feature of the DRIHM science gateway (
http://portal.drihm.eu
)
is the possibility to run a simulation based on the above- mentioned experiment
suites using an integrated, user-friendly interface hiding all the low-level details due
to the submission of jobs on a heterogeneous infrastructure. A hydrometeorological
scientist, in fact, needs only to select the steps to execute, to con
gure each of them,
and then to submit the experiment. To this extent, there are two important features
of WS-PGRADE/gUSE that have been exploited in DRIHM: the DCI Bridge and
the ASM.
State-of-the-art software tools (called model engines or just models) are avail-
able for each experiment suite. These models differ in terms of platform require-
ments and model coupling (Clematis 2012): some models are designed for POSIX
systems, and thus are easy to port onto different platforms. Others are designed for
Windows or place strong requirements on libraries and other software tools a
hosting system has to provide. Moreover, some models are based on the Ensemble
forecasting, which is a kind of Monte Carlo analysis, and therefore they require
high throughput computing, while others require HPC to provide meaningful results
for large scale simulations. This is the reason why in the project there is the need to
consider all the resources provided by the European e-Infrastructure ecosystem.
This means that, beside the Grid resources provided to the project by the EGI, there
is the need to consider other
that grant services that did not have a
place (for performance and/or functionality reasons) in the core Grid platform. In
particular, the DRIHM project considers resources from the Partnership for
Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) (Fiori 2014), data repositories, (Linux)
dedicated nodes, specialized hardware, Windows nodes, Cloud (in particular, the
EGI FedCloud infrastructure), and Web services. Consequently, the necessity for a
common interface layer like the DCI Bridge, which provides a standard access to all
of these components, is obvious.
As regards the ASM, this is a key feature for providing end users with high-
level
“
components
”
interfaces. For example, with WS-PGRADE it
is possible to de
ne the
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