Case studies

Improved weather predictions and disaster warnings

Over the last decade, the world has experienced an increasing number of high-impact meteorological events which have disrupted national services, damaged or destroyed infrastructures and resources, and has resulted in a loss of human life. High impact weather is defined by its disastrous impact on society and economy; it includes e.g. tropical cyclones, extreme rainfalls and high wind speeds, etc. It is, therefore, a major scientific challenge of the next decade to reduce and mitigate natural disasters relying on improved weather predictions and by giving early and reliable access to data and information to authorities and services which are in charge of warning and prevention.

Methodological developments and improved databases from weather simulation and observation combined with advanced IT-Technologies are key for this. The vision is of a cooperative of Met Services who combine their various skills and capabilities to ensure all are provided with the best environmental forecast possible, allowing impact scenarios to provide optimum planning information world wide. This vision relies upon supporting technology to enable multiple, geographically separated centers to generate a timely and reliant ensemble product. In the near future virtual computing may allow the easy exchange of data and products in an effective and efficient manner.

America’s Cup race yacht design

Team Shosholoza is the South African America’s Cup Challenge Team for 2007 with T-Systems as the main sponsor. High-tech sailing today is not possible without sophisticated IT-support in the design-phase of the boats as well as in the races.

The real challenge for the IT-support comes from the fact, that the design teams are very dynamic with respect to the people and organizations involved as well as concerning the locality at which the compute power is needed. Furthermore, due to the fierce competition no security compromises are allowed.

Team Shosholoza has access to some of the fastest computers in the world for shape optimizations of the boat based on computational structural mechanics and computational fluid dynamics methods as well as for the calculation of mission scenarios just before the races. This includes online local weather-predictions based on the coarse grain calculations from the weather-services and measurements of the actual conditions.

The required flexibility could only be achieved using UNICORE Grid technology as the main component for the access to computing resources.

Drug design

Molecular modeling, molecular engineering and drug discovery, as closely related fields, provided the set of real life applications central to the OpenMolGRID project. OpenMolGRID was conceived to exploit the power of Grid Computing to shorten the time to solution for drug discovery, specifically the identification of promising new compounds as potential drug candidates.