Ensuring cyber infrastructure in rural areas meet demand in emergencies

neighborhood sane: “They were the only reliable source of information about where the fire was burning.”

For now, HPWREN will continue to host content on its original server, while the scalable server complex at Calit2 hosts a mirror site.

Calit2 copies HPWREN content from HPWREN cameras via iRODS, a second-generation data grid system, to a Calit Sun Thumper, which then replicates it on three other Thumpers (two in Calit2’s server room in Atkinson Hall, and one in GreenLight’s SunMD modular datacenter adjacent to the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences).

All the Thumpers are running on the NSF-funded, Calit2-led OptIPuter ultra-broadband network linking major research buildings on the UCSD campus. Web servers have been setup on the Thumpers and the A10 load balancer was installed to distribute web requests across multiple servers. p“In addition to pulling content from multiple servers, increasing speed and availability,” explained Hidley, “the load balancer can optimize TCP traffic as well as provide caching and data-compression offloading to improve performance. The load balancer can also prioritize user requests via IP addresses, giving access priority and predictable response to emergency responders.”

The new cyber infrastructure should be able to respond to hundreds of thousands of visitors, and scale even higher on a moment’s notice with the addition of new Thumpers.

“It’s not just creating redundancy in the system or playing the role of backup, although that is part of it in the short run,” said Braun. “Scalable servers are much better able to distribute the content, so over time the scalable system will eventually become the main site.”

The launch announced today is a beta deployment of the system, but consumers can already visit the site and download data. The engineers still want to put the system through its paces while mimicking the load factors to be expected in a large-scale disaster scenario. “We are finalizing the stress testing on a portion of the back end,” said Calit2’s Joe Keefe. “We are currently in a staging phase, and we should be able to fully test a complete load balancing structure very soon.”

“We expect significant improvement in performance, especially during large-scale events,” concluded HPWREN’s Braun. “Eventually we look forward to integrating more environmental sensors, not just cameras, into the network. We could integrate various other kinds of environmental sensors to present a collated view of complex situations. Examples are water and air quality, meteorological data, and seismic data. Many such sensors are already in operation on HPWREN.”