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Crisis 2005 - a CyberThriller

by Geoffrey C. Fox

The trip to the opera was the high point for the thousands of international visitors to the conference. They were streaming out of the new center which had been built in a decaying downtown area. Here old warehouses were still mixed with the proud new buildings of the economic redevelopment zone.

Luke CyberCzar was in charge of the crisis center when the first 911 video dial tones showed the horrifying sight. A gigantic set of explosions rocked a set of old chemical warehouses and fires and fumes of unknown composition ringed the new opera complex. The frightened audience panicked and scattered this way and that into the surrounding alleys. Of course the digital video crews covering the opera immediately switched their cameras to this catastrophe. Just a few seconds after those 911 calls, all the MPEG decoders on the GII were presenting the chaos, damage and injuries live to a world whose cybereyes were trained on Luke.

Luke was unlike many today, well prepared for this. At university, he had been a star student with his Global Citizen master's specialty in Electronic Intuition which had covered what the GII and HPCC could do and not do for judgment support -- the science of making impossible decisions in real time with unprepared incomplete information. This education had been augmented with specialized simulations in FEMA's central training facility where various disasters were presented using experience and technology developed from DOD's JWID and DSI activities of the previous decade. Within seconds of the crisis developing, the command center had suggested and Luke confirmed and refined the reservation of key GII resources. This included communication links but much more besides these emergency lanes. Academic supercomputers running at 10 teraflop sustained performance, rolled out their simulations of colliding black holes and quark substructure. Now they stood ready to model the movement of the chemical plumes and raging fires. Specialized agents roamed the Web(GII) and key resources were identified and activated. The video, audio and database streams associated with the crisis were routed through translation service bureaus on the Web. Thus both Luke and the many foreign doctors, scientists and decision makers which would become involved in the crisis could have information presented to them in their native tongue. Advanced metacomputer support developed eight years before by the HPCC initiative, linked the national supercomputers with specialized chemistry centers (anchor-desks) on the GII which applied the necessary databases and reaction simulations needed for the plume prediction. Fortunately all these codes were written in the scalable language distributed simulations relied on fault tolerant high performance networking protocols and recently developed neural network based network management strategies which ensured that the GII's ATM backbone supplied on demand the necessary secure low latency bandwidth.

The judgment support environment was developed by the government to support military, law enforcement and civilian crisis needs. Although these apications are critical to the nation there is not a large enough market to expect an industry to develop on its own. However proper attention to well chosen standards, allows the crisis management application to build on top of NII services designed for larger areas such as digital libraries, electronic commerce, manufacturing and health care. The thriving middleware industry supplies the necessary integration technologies including agents, wrappers and graphical scripting environments. Luke benefits from the natural convenient interface maximizing the effectiveness of the tired harried judgment maker. This build on advanced MOO and VR ideas and tailors the computer interface to the problem at hand. Luke sees a three dimensional GIS (Geographical Information System) when viewing the spatial confusion of the catastrophe; a virtual podium when he briefs cyberworld; a boardroom when defending his actions to angry foreign politicians; a summer wildflower meadow in moments of thought. He shares this virtual environment with Jane who is in charge of tactical operations for the crisis and by his electronic side at all times. They share this televirtual environment with other judgment makers and those facing the crisis in the field. Whether supported by supercomputer or hand held personal assistant, all access the same WebTop environment with a full range of collaboration and productivity tools whose capability adjusts to the available compute and communication resource. In this way the GII enables the best adaptive linking of "come-as-you-are" computational, communication and personnel resources. Monitors record Luke's actions so that the environment may learn for future events and today note an increase of errors or stress which is automatically signaled to Luke to warn him that more care or rest is needed. Strong leaders such as Luke take such advice more kindly from analytic computers than from trusted aides.

Jane lives hundreds of miles away in a new cyberhamlet in the northern Adirondacks but this does not limit her effectiveness. In the area of the catastrophe, ISDN installed at the end of the previous century is the dominant digital infrastructure. This is augmented by cellular connections and supplies digital video to a central image processing and MPP multimedia server resource. This combines and links different views of the same scene taken by separate cameras. Jane is able to use the effective stereo three dimensional view of the crisis to pull off remarkable rescues and make best use of the available police, medical and fire fighting personnel. Fortunately basic mathematics research funded by HPCC has developed novel adaptive compression algorithms and so Jane gets from her ISDN links the same resolution that ten years before, one expected to need ATM performance with one to two megabit second bandwidth and MPEG compression. The local authorities in the area of the catastrophe had fully implemented the new metadata standards and so Jane was able to immediately access the necessary community databases to identify medical and other crisis relevant resources. Jane issues a cyberalert for hospitals who could care for the unusual chemical poisonings. Medical records are fetched from distributed databases throughout the globe so each patient is given just the right care. Digital maps of the catastrophe area, stored in the community network, are superimposed on the real-time images to optimally plan search and rescue operations. Proprietary data is made available with the crisis priority automatically overriding the normal legal safeguards so that crisis managers can also use the best available multimedia yellow pages to help their personnel in the area find key resources.

Jason Netarrow was in the operations center. He had first experienced this infrastructure in the Living Textbook education environment used in his Oneida nation school. This had allowed him electronic virtual field trips where he had studied the rich culture and geography of his home region. This had been followed by a degree in computational science where he had taken the Information track with distinction. Using these skills he monitored the intense electronic security on the GII as private medical data from throughout the world was transported to the medical teams who used advanced dynamic medical intelligence techniques building on the telemedicine experiments of ten years ago. In a quiet moment he installed an update of WebFoil which Luke could then use to more convincingly calm the angry GII. This incorporated dynamic scaling of Luke's ideas into the optimal fonts, alphabet and language using client software automatically downloaded when viewer accessed Luke's presentation. The now standard multicast CORBA combining PC and HPCC technologies ensured efficient implementation. Jason authorized the delay of TWNN (TIme Warner Network News) transmission as the full local hundred gigabit communication bandwidth was devoted to a complex data assimilation model where chemical monitor readouts from the catastrophe were directly linked to the model running on a complex metacomputer managed by the trained WebWork robots. These used load balancing and migration techniques first developed for irregular High Performance Fortran and message passing applications. Metacomputer electromagnetic simulations ensured that the various emergency antenna and receivers were optimally deployed to maximize bandwidth and minimize interference. Previous such catastrophes had pointed out the serious side effects on the financial markets when the lifes of important political and industry dignatries were threatened. So Jason also allowed access of financial simulation robots to the communication lifeline so that they could complete the necessary risk avoidance Monte Carlo computations as metacomputer cycles became available.

By the morning, the crisis is over and the national editorials are again thankful for the far sighted HPCC program of the previous century which supplied so many of the key technologies which limited damage and loss of life.


Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, Syracuse NY.