DHARMA: Domain-specific Metaware for Hydrologic Applications

IIS-0082667


Principal Investigator

 Daniel A Andresen
Department of Computing and Information Sciences
 Kansas State University
234 Nichols Hall
 Manhattan KS 66506
(785)532-6350
 (785)532-7353
dan@ksu.edu
 http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~dan


Co-PI

 Mitchell Neilsen
Department of Computing and Information Sciences
 Kansas State University
234 Nichols Hall
 Manhattan KS 66506
(785)532-6350
 (785)532-7353
neilsen@ksu.edu
 http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~neilsen


Co-PI

 Gurdip Singh
Department of Computing and Information Sciences
 Kansas State University
234 Nichols Hall
 Manhattan KS 66506
(785)532-6350
 (785)532-7353
singh@ksu.edu
 http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~singh


Co-PI

 Michael C Hirschi
Department of Agricultural Engineering
 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
338 Agricultural Engineering Sciences Building
 1304 W. Pennsylvania Avenue Urbana IL 61801
(217)333-3570
 (217) 244-0323
mch@uiuc.edu
 http://www.age.uiuc.edu/people/hirschi.html


Co-PI

 Prasanta Kalita
Department of Agricultural Engineering
 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
338 Agricultural Engineering Sciences Building
 1304 W. Pennsylvania Avenue Urbana IL 61801
(217)333-3570
 (217) 244-0323
pkalita@uiuc.edu
 http://www.age.uiuc.edu/people/pkalita.html

Keywords

 hydrology
distributed computing
XML
automatic data acquisition

Project Summary
Our objective is to advance the fields of hydrology and computer science. In hydrology, we are proposing to expand the applicability of the WEPP (Water Erosion Prediction Project) model and the SITES (Water Resource Site Analysis) model to large watersheds, specifically applying the extended model to the Lake Decatur watershed in Illinois. We intend to enable the development of new models for predicting erosion within watersheds by allowing significantly easier access to the computational power and data acquisition capabilities of the Internet. Within computer science, we intend to advance the state of the art in automatic distributed data acquisition and distributed scheduling, utilizing the power of recent developments in metacomputing (e.g., Globus and Legion) and digital libraries.

Publications and Products
    K. Kim, P. Kalita, D. Andresen, M. Nielsen, and G. Singh, Using a domain-specific middleware system (DHARMA) to extend WEPP applicability to large watersheds, to appear in the Proceedings of the 2003 Annual International ASAE Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, July 27-30, 2003
    D. Andresen, M. Neilsen, G. Singh, P. Kalita, Domain-specific Metaware for Hydrologic Applications in the International Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems and Networks, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 178-184, 2002. (also in the Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (PDCS 2002), pp. 416--421, Cambridge, MA, November 4-6, 2002).
    D. Andresen, M. Neilsen, G. Singh, P. Kalita, M. Hirschi, ``DHARMA: Domain-specific Metaware for Hydrologic Applications,'' in the Poster Proceedings of the Twelfth IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC '03), Seattle, WA, June 22-24, 2003.

Project Impact

 We have been actively engaged in a number of different areas. We have had four graduate students on the project, who have been collaborating with the PIs on programming, system design, and gathering/verifying hydrological data sets. Two of these have since graduated with MS thesis topics relating to the project. We have also employed several domestic undergraduates in our programming and design efforts, which has been a great contribution.
For the most part, development up to this point has occurred on the departmental Beowulf cluster of dual- and quad-processor machines. We augmented this with several systems at the University of Kansas. Contact with industry has been sporadic, but we have maintained close connections (including several visits) with both our co-PIs and interested agencies such as the USDA.

Goals, Objectives and Targeted Activities

 This year, we met one of our primary goals: the simulation of the entire Lake Decatur watershed using WEPP (the first time in history), and are progressing rapidly towards completing our plan to develop a layer of middleware to interface several hydrologic simulations with the computing power of the National Computational Grid, and the domain-specific informational resources available on local workstations and through the Internet.
We have successfully integrated two simulations, SITES and WEPP, and are working on several others (HEC-RAS and AgNPS). We have developed the software to perform automatic data acquisition via the Internet for geotemporal climatic data from online databases; merge the data necessary for the computation to occur, from online, local, and cached resources; smart caching of intermediate results to allow for reuse in future simulation cycles; acquire a task graph from the UI layer, and optimize it through application-specific knowledge and dynamic results caching strategies; and interface with computing resource managers, such as Condor.
The system is intended for use not only by hydrologic researchers, but also by engineers in the field working on a daily basis. These engineers typically have older, inadequate local computing power for the increasingly complex models required. Use of DHARMA GUI will allow the engineers to tackle problems on a scale impossible without sophisticated domain-specific computational management systems. Over the course of the next year, we plan to extend our extensible, object-oriented framework for representing elements such as simulation models and data. Hydrologic components in the watershed (cells, streams, reservoirs, etc.) are encapsulated as object with properties defining their attributes (vegetal cover, slope, elevation, etc.) and methods defining operations on the objects (surface flow, infiltration, etc.). By defining a canonical representation for various types of objects via a class-specific DTD, we will be able to more easily combine complex simulations in a holistic system. We also plan to further test our system with actual data from the Lake Decatur watershed.

Area Background

 The WEPP watershed model is a continuous simulation processed-based model which represents new soil erosion prediction technology based on fundamentals of stochastic weather generation, infiltration theory, hydrology, soil physics, plant science, hydraulics, and erosion mechanics. The applicability of the model, however, is limited to very small watersheds (up to few hundred acres) due to currently available computer technology in handling input data requirement. The model is capable of estimating spatial and temporal distribution of soil loss, runoff, and sediment yield, and can be extrapolated to a broad range of conditions that may not be practical or economical to field test. WEPP is the only model that is currently available for accurate prediction of soil erosion and sedimentation based on fundamental scientific theory and principles. If the WEPP model can be advanced so that it can be applied to actual watersheds that are often several thousand acres, it will bring a revolutionary change in hydrologic modeling on the watershed scale. Currently, all watershed scale hydrologic models are based on empirical relationship and seldom include process interactions among soils, hydrologic, plant, and atmospheric processes. WEPP will be the only such model which will provide accurate predictions and evaluate effects of alternative watershed management practices on watershed water quality.

Area References
    D. Andresen, T. Yang, D. Watson, and A. Poulakidas. Dynamic processor scheduling with client resources for fast multi-resolution WWW image browsing. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symp. on Parallel Processing (IPPS’97), pages 167-173, Geneva, Switzerland, April 1997.
    C.G. Henry, P.K. Kalita, and M.R. Keaton. Using WEPP Watershed Model for Crosscreek Water-shed, Kansas. In Proceedings of the 1997 ASAE Mid-Central Annual Meeting, St. Joseph, MO, ASAE Paper No. MC97-133, 1997.
    I. Foster and C. Kesselman. Globus: A metacomputing infrastructure toolkit. The International Journal of Supercomputer Applications and High Performance Computing, 11(2):115 -128, Summer 1997.
    M.L. Neilsen and D.M. Temple, A concurrent simulation model for analysis of water control structures at the watershed scale, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications, pp. 1565-1570, June, 2000.

Project Websites

 http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~dan/dharma.html Project web site with papers, links, and resources.