Session

DescriptionResponding to disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, winter weather conditions, spread of diseases, and accidents; technological advances are creating exciting new opportunities that have the potential to move HPC well beyond traditional computational workloads. While HPC has a long history of simulating disasters after the fact, an exciting possibility is to use these resources to support emergency, urgent, decision making in real-time. As our ability to capture data continues to grow significantly, it is only now possible to combine high velocity data and live analytics with HPC models to aid in urgently responding to real-world problems, ultimately saving lives and reducing economic loss. To make this vision a reality, a variety of technical and policy challenges must be identified and overcome. Whether it be developing more interactive simulation codes which include real-time data feeds, improving in-situ data analysis techniques, developing new large-scale data visualisation techniques, or guaranteeing bounded and predictable machine queue times, the challenges here are significant. In this minisymposium, we will discuss this emerging HPC use-case by bringing together experts in the field, researchers, practitioners, and interested parties from across our community to identify and tackle issues involved in using HPC for urgent decision making.