HPC for urgent decision making (UrgentHPC)

Responding to disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, extreme flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, winter weather conditions, and accidents; technological advances are creating exciting new opportunities that have the potential to move HPC well beyond traditional computational workloads. Whilst HPC has a long history of simulating disasters, what’s missing to support emergency, urgent, decision making is fast, real-time acquisition of data and the ability to guarantee time constraints.

Our ability to capture data continues to grow very significantly, and combining high velocity data and live analytics with HPC models can aid in urgently responding to real-world problems, ultimately saving lives and reducing economic loss. It’s not just responding to disasters, but also making urgent decisions addressing more general issues such as human health emergencies and global diseases. The challenges here are significant, but if HPC can be proven as a tool in responding to these real-world issues, the impact for our community is huge.

Leveraging HPC for urgent decision making requires expertise in a wide range of areas, from dealing with real-time data, to experience in generating results within a specific time frame (real-time constraints), and generating visualisations enabling front-line decision makers to make correct choices first time, every time. It isn’t just technical challenges, but also policy issues that also need to be considered such as utilising our HPC machines in a more interactive manner to enable the urgent exploration of numerous disaster responses.

This workshop will bring together stakeholders, researchers and practitioners from across the HPC community to identify and tackle issues involved in using HPC for urgent decision making. Success stories, case-studies and challenges will be shared, with the goal of further building up a community around leveraging HPC as an important tool in urgently responding to disasters and societal challenges.