Modeling-as-a-Service (MaaS) using the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP)

Session A3: Innovative Architectures and Approaches of Cloud and Mobile Technology for Environmental Modeling

Cloud infrastructures for modelling activities such as data processing, performing environmental simulations, or conducting model calibrations/optimizations provide a cost effective alternative to traditional high performance computing approaches. Cloud-based modelling examples emerged into the more formal notion: "Model-as-a-Service" (MaaS). This paper presents the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) as a software framework offering MaaS. It describes both the internal CSIP infrastructure and software architecture that manages cloud resources for typical modelling tasks, and the use of CSIP's "ModelServices API" for a modelling application. CSIP's architecture supports fast and resource aware auto-scaling of computational resources. An example model service is presented: the USDA hydrograph model EFH2 used in the desktop-based "engineering field tools" is deployed as a CSIP service. This and other MaaS CSIP examples benefit from the use of cloud resources to enable straightforward scalable model deployment into cloud environments.