A task-based ubiquitous approach to urgent computing for disaster management

Abstract

In spite of the advances in today's technologies, most disasters are hard to predict and prevent. Disaster management to reduce damages and losses is particularly important. Computations to predict the effect of an impending or prevailing disaster, i.e. urgent computing, can support civil protection services to make informed decisions that can improve the efficiency of mitigation activities and reduce the causalities and losses. Accessibility to underlying distributed resource sets should be possible from ubiquitous end user devices, especially in the chaotic environment that entails a disaster. The inherent unpredictability of disasters can render any best made plans to prepare resources in advance futile. It is thus essential to acquire the ability to swiftly organise a resource for urgent computing, commonly while facing uncertainty in computation requirements and dynamism of computing environments on heterogeneous distributed resources. These challenges have to be conquered for urgent computing to be successfully realised. A task-based ubiquitous approach established on top of a three layers architecture is recommended. This architecture allows a separation of concerns between the accessibility needs from the resource/environment and use case specific conditions. Heterogeneity of distributed resources and environments is managed by the task-based setup with a set of subtask functions. Four urgent managers are also introduced to administer the urgent computing requirements. The ultimate aim is to provide an urgent computer system framework for supporting time-critical computations for a wide array of use cases on heterogeneous distributed resources.