Application of grids, clouds and high-performance computing in research of urbanization

Abstract

Urbanization is a major process changing the land surface features that substantially affects human behaviors, e.g. population, mobility and economic activities. From the engineering point of view, cities and urban areas are major sources of heat and mass, modifying the energy budget and constituents of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). Major problems include degrading air quality, visibility impairment and global warming, etc. The aforementioned problems have a wide range of spatial (neighborhood to global) and temporal (hours to decades) scales. The current solution approaches mainly depend on the scale of length and time, e.g. source-level or meso-scale modeling but unfortunately might often overlook those motions across two (or even more) scales. Indeed, the atmospheric processes are tightly coupled with each other that end up with complicated non-linear effects affecting the biosphere. We thus need for a sophisticated, multidisciplinary approach to examine the problems and seek for innovative solution to cope with this global challenge. In this paper, I will review the application of global e-infrastructure and high-performance computing (HPC) to research related to urbanization in recent years. Attention will be paid on the atmospheric processes and pollutant transport over urban areas as well as our collective effort working toward a unified solution for the Earth as a single system. First of all, the pros and cons of urbanization will be compared. After highlighting the drawback related to urbanization, the current solution approaches, laboratory experiments, field monitoring and mathematical modeling, will be introduced. In view of the scales, large datasets, either from measurement or simulation, will be generated continuously. We will then look into how the scientific community uses cutting-edge computing power, such as grids, clouds and HPC, to tackle those problems related to urban development. Typical examples cover modeling of atmospheric processes, global information system (GIS), together with post-processing and management of big data, etc., for urbanization in the current era. Finally, we will elaborate how scientists from different background, by utilizing computing infrastructure and information technology, could collaborate and share the most valuable research data, findings, and knowledge in a mutually successful manner as well as to improve the Earth and our living environment.