National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) Distributed Data Management

HydroShare Contributors: Ray Idaszak (Poster Lead, HydroShare Co-PI)9,8, David Tarboton (HydroShare PI)2, Alva Couch4,6, Hong Yi9,8, Michael Stealey9,8
NFIE Contributors: David Maidment (NFIE Lead)1, Andrew Ernest3, Rick Hooper6, Fernando Salas1, Marcelo Somos Valenzuela1, Kevin Smith4,
Scott Christensen5, Deborah Crocker3, Dan Ames5, Jim Nelson5, Nathan Swain5, Zhiyu (Drew) Li5, Shawn Crawley5, Jon Goodall12
National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) Contributor: Stan Ahalt (Director, RENCI; Chair, NCDS)8,9,7
Microsoft Contributors: Prashant Dhingra11, Kristin Tolle11
Texas Advanced Computing Center Contributors: John Cazes10, Chris Jordan10, Mike Packard10, Sergio Leal10

Abstract

Funding, in part:
OCI-1148453
OCI-1148090

About NFIE

HydroShare (see http://hydroshare.cuahsi.org/) is an online, collaborative system being developed for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. The goal of
HydroShare is to enable scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic data and models, retrieve them to their desktop or perform analyses in a distributed
computing environment that may include grid, cloud or high performance computing. Scientists may also publish outcomes (data, results or models) into
HydroShare, using the system as a collaboration platform for sharing data, models and analyses. The integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS, see
http://irods.org/) is an open-source distributed data management system with worldwide adoption. iRODS supports distributed shared data collections and has
been used to enable regional, national, and international research collaborations. As such, HydroShare combined with native access to iRODS was a natural choice
by the leaders of the National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) for the distributed data management needs of the students of the NFIE Summer Institute.
An iRODS distributed datagrid was set up between the Texas Advance Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas Austin, the University of Alabama, RENCI
and NCDS at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an instance in the Azure cloud environment provided by a grant from Microsoft. 35TB of capacity
are under management in the NFIE iRODS datagrid. This poster describes the NFIE distributed data management configuration and how NFIE students are using
HydroShare with the NFIE iRODS datagrid to support their data management requirements.

The academic community, coordinated by CUAHSI, is being invited by the National Weather Service and its
partner federal agencies to participate in a National Flood Interoperability Experiment (NFIE) to help build a
new high resolution, near real-time hydrologic simulation and forecasting model for the United States. This
opportunity is created through the opening of a new National Water Center on the Tuscaloosa campus of the
University of Alabama, which is to become the national center for river flow forecasting. The intent is to
establish a research partnership with the academic community that will sustain innovation into the future.
The National Water Center and the University of Alabama hosted a seven week intensive Summer Institute in
June July, 2015. The program provided the opportunity for students to participate in developing and
modifying a prototype NFIE flow modeling and data testbed that is being created based on the NHDPlus
geospatial dataset describing the nations river network. See https://www.cuahsi.org/NFIE.

iRODS (http://irods.org) is middleware used to host 35TB of capacity for NFIE served out of RENCI/NCDS
and distributed transparently across TACC, University of Alabama, and Azure with planned expansion to
CyberGIS and UCAR. Currently over 33,000 files are in NFIE. Workflows include 15 day ensemble surface
and subsurface runoff forecasts from the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)
Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), and hourly 15 hour forecast outputs from the operational High
Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) numerical weather model and the Global Forecast System (GFS).

Tethys

apps.hydroshare.org

HydroShare (www.hydroshare.org) is an online, collaborative system

for open sharing of hydrologic data and models. NFIE users can use
HydroShare to share models and results with the broader hydrology
community. NFIE data is ingested directly from iRODS into
HydroShare via HydroShares browser-based interface. Tethys
(apps.hydroshare.org) web apps can be used natively within
HydroShare for visualization and analysis.

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