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Research has shown that climate change creates warmer temperatures and drier conditions, leading to longer wildfire seasons and increased wildfire risks in the United States. These factors have in turn led to increases in the frequency, extent, and severity of wildfires in recent years. Given the danger posed by wildland fires to people, property, wildlife, and the environment, there is an urgency to provide tools for effective wildfire management. Early detection of wildfires is essential to minimizing potentially catastrophic destruction. In this paper, we present our work on integrating multiple data sources in SmokeyNet, a deep learning model using spatio-temporal information to detect smoke from wildland fires. Camera image data is integrated with weather sensor measurements and processed by SmokeyNet to create a multimodal wildland fire smoke detection system. We present our results comparing performance in terms of both accuracy and time-to-detection for multimodal data vs. a single data source. With a time-to-detection of only a few minutes, SmokeyNet can serve as an automated early notification system, providing a useful tool in the fight against destructive wildfires.

This paper shows how the wildfire simulation tool farsite is augmented with data assimilation capabilities that exploit the notion of barrier points and a constraint-point ensemble Kalman filtering to update wildfire perimeter predictions. Based on observations of the actual fire perimeter, stationary points on the fire perimeter are identified as barrier points and combined with a recursive update of the initial fire perimeter. It is shown that the combination of barrier point identification and using the barrier points as constraints in the ensemble Kalman filter gives a significant improvement in the forward prediction of the fire perimeter. The results are illustrated on the use case of the 2016 Sandfire that burned in the Angeles National Forest, east of the Santa Clarita Valley in Los Angeles County, California.

Scientific workflows are powerful tools for management of scalable experiments, often composed of complex tasks running on distributed resources. Existing cyberinfrastructure provides components that can be utilized within repeatable workflows. However, data and computing advances continuously change the way scientific workflows get developed and executed, pushing the scientific activity to be more data-driven, heterogeneous and collaborative. Workflow development today depends on the effective collaboration and communication of a cross-disciplinary team, not only with humans but also with analytical systems and infrastructure. This paper presents a collaboration-centered reference architecture to extend workflow systems with dynamic, predictable and programmable interfaces to systems and infrastructure while bridging the exploratory and scalable activities in the scientific process. We also present a conceptual design towards the development of methodologies and tools for effective workflow-driven collaborations, namely the PPoDS methodology and the SmartFlows Toolkit for smart utilization of workflows in a rapidly evolving cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.

Workflows provide an expressive programming model for fine-grained control of large-scale applications in distributed computing environments. Accurate estimates of complex workflow execution metrics on large-scale machines have several key advantages. The performance of scheduling algorithms that rely on estimates of execution metrics degrades when the accuracy of predicted execution metrics decreases. This in-progress paper presents a technique being developed to improve the accuracy of predicted performance metrics of large-scale workflows on distributed platforms. The central idea of this work is to train resource-centric machine learning agents to capture complex relationships between a set of program instructions and their performance metrics when executed on a specific resource. This resource-centric view of a workflow exploits the fact that predicting execution times of sub-modules of a workflow requires monitoring and modeling of a few dynamic and static features. We transform the input workflow that is essentially a directed acyclic graph of actions into a Physical Resource Execution Plan (PREP). This transformation enables us to model an arbitrarily complex workflow as a set of simpler programs running on physical nodes. We delegate a machine learning model to capture performance metrics for each resource type when it executes different program instructions under varying degrees of resource contention. Our algorithm takes the prediction metrics from each resource agent and composes the overall workflow performance metrics by utilizing the structure of the corresponding Physical Resource Execution Plan., This paper was presented at: 6th Workshop on Big Data Analytics: Challenges, and Opportunities (BDAC) at the 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC 2015)

Scientific workflows integrate data and computing interfaces as configurable, semi-automatic graphs to solve a scientific problem. Kepler is such a software system for designing, executing, reusing, evolving, archiving and sharing scientific workflows. Electron tomography (ET) enables high-resolution views of complex cellular structures, such as cytoskeletons, organelles, viruses and chromosomes. Imaging investigations produce large datasets. For instance, in Electron Tomography, the size of a 16 fold image tilt series is about 65 Gigabytes with each projection image including 4096 by 4096 pixels. When we use serial sections or montage technique for large field ET, the dataset will be even larger. For higher resolution images with multiple tilt series, the data size may be in terabyte range. Demands of mass data processing and complex algorithms require the integration of diverse codes into flexible software structures. This paper describes a workflow for Electron Tomography Programs in Kepler (EPiK). This EPiK workflow embeds the tracking process of IMOD, and realizes the main algorithms including filtered backprojection (FBP) from TxBR and iterative reconstruction methods. We have tested the three dimensional (3D) reconstruction process using EPiK on ET data. EPiK can be a potential toolkit for biology researchers with the advantage of logical viewing, easy handling, convenient sharing and future extensibility.