Generating the best possible models of storm surge, flooding and coastal conditions has been a major goal of the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center. While the computing power necessary to model these complex data sets normally requires the use of Dept. of Defense supercomputers, the ERDC has recently undertaken an effort to evaluate cloud-based computing services to augment its capabilities. This includes a recent agreement with Microsoft to evaluate the Azure cloud environment and its predictive analytics tools for how they could improve climate modeling and natural disaster resilience planning. While not a replacement for ERDC’s existing workflows, these cloud-based systems could allow for a more reactive and faster approach to storm and climate modeling, with implications for how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers evaluates threats posed by sea-level rise and climate change.
“We’ve been evaluating cloud computing, not just Microsoft Azure but also AWS [Amazon Web Services] as well,” says Carol Wortman, chief of the Army Corps governance and architecture division. In a series of trials in 2020, the ERDC ran versions of its Coastal Storm Modeling System (CSTORM-MS) within these cloud environments, and found it was comparable in quality to what it generated using the powerful supercomputers at the Dept. of Defense’s Supercomputing Resource Center. “The usability worked really well on them; it was similar to the HPC [High Performance Computing] systems,” Wortman tells ENR.