Emergency communicationEnsuring cyber infrastructure in rural areas meet demand in emergencies
Research groups at the University of California, San Diego are building a scalable computer infrastructure to provide better access to camera feeds from rural areas when fires, earthquakes, flash floods, or other natural disasters hit San Diego County; approximately 1,000 people visit High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network’s (HPWREN) Web page to view camera feeds on a typical day. On a not-so-typical day — like when snow recently blanketed large swathes of rural San Diego mountaintops — the number of visitors quadrupled
Ahead of the next fire season in parched areas of southern California, research groups at the University of California, San Diego are building a scalable computer infrastructure to provide better access to camera feeds from rural areas when fires, earthquakes, flash floods or other natural disasters hit San Diego County.
“San Diegans need somewhere to turn when a natural disaster hits a rural area nearby, in order to make better decisions about what to do next,” said Hans-Werner Braun, a research scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and director of its Applied Network Research group, which operates the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN). “Until now we have been able to provide that service covering large parts of San Diego’s back-country, but now we need to ensure that during the next crisis, peak demand for our data will not swamp our ability to keep the camera feeds up and running.”
The UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the National Science Foundation-funded HPWREN are partnering on the new project.
“Calit2 is enriching situational awareness in rural San Diego not just for those who live there, as well as their friends and family elsewhere, but also for emergency responders who need to know the situation on the ground before they arrive on the scene,” said Calit2 director Larry Smarr. “HPWREN is a tremendous asset, and with Calit2 providing a more scalable data server architecture and backend with additional hardware, the network can serve the needs of many more people and agencies – not just during wildfires, but in other emergencies as well.”
Approximately 1,000 people visit HPWREN’s Web page to view camera feeds on a typical day. On a not-so-typical day – like when snow recently blanketed large swathes of rural San Diego mountaintops — the number of visitors quadrupled.
Braun compares that with what happened during the 2007 Harris Fire. “We ended up at the peak with roughly 50,000 visitors in a single day, and they downloaded more than 70 gigabytes of data from a single server,” he said. “Keep in mind that every page visit may return 30, 40, or 50 items, or ‘hits’, so those peak loads can overwhelm a server. We know that a lot of people were unable to get through on their first try, so they had to keep trying if it was critical to know how far
