Cyberinfrastructure for Scalable Access to Stream Flow Analysis

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

Traditionally the various components of flow analysis including flooding, drought, base-flow, pollutant loading, and duration curves have been examined independently by various analysis methods or software packages. A better approach would be to combine these multiple packages into a single web-tool to improve access. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provides a scalable infrastructure for model implementation, which is a necessity of web services due to the characteristics of web traffic. IaaS centralizes the computational burden and overhead of multiple model runs from local computers to online servers. This paper demonstrates the scalability benefits of the Comprehensive Flow Analysis (CFA) tool in an IaaS environment. The CFA tool is available through the Environmental Risk Assessment Management System (eRAMS) website. eRAMS facilitates GIS data manipulation, visualization, and preparation of input information for models like CFA. eRAMS uses the Cloud Services Innovation Platform (CSIP) to request runs of the analyses within CFA. CSIP is an IaaS cloud modeling framework designed for executing various environmental models. This paper summarizes a scalability analysis of the analysis methods within CFA using CSIP in a cloud server environment.