Ensuring cyber infrastructure in rural areas meet demand in emergencies
the flames had spread, and to know whether their homes were in the line of fire. It’s very hard to optimize for a system that can jump up to 50 times normal daily users for brief periods of time — and you don’t know which day the disaster will strike.”
After HPWREN partnered last October with the County of San Diego and Calit2 on the FireSight project to deploy new cameras on Mt. Woodson, Red Mountain (near Fallbrook) and elsewhere, it became clear that enhancing the camera network was not enough. It had to be able to withstand an onslaught of visitors to the website.
Calit2 proposed to HPWREN’s Braun that the institute dedicate server hardware from its NSF-funded GreenLight project to handle the peak loading. The project would also help the GreenLight project by providing another application type that can be tracked for its energy usage. Noted GreenLight principal investigator Tom DeFanti: “We were able to spend significant GreenLight funds for this because of the opportunity for energy monitoring of at-scale, broad-interest services.”
The solution devised by Calit2 engineers, including Greg Hidley, Brian Dunne, Joe Keefe, and Chris Misleh, is fully scalable, and robust enough to handle any foreseeable response to wildfires or other visible hazards. “The HPWREN and GreenLight teams developed a strategy to improve access to HPWREN camera data,” said Hidley, chief engineer on the GreenLight project. “Our team put together an infrastructure upgrade implementation plan for this strategy designed to improve performance, control and reliability of HPWREN data access as well as provide improved infrastructure reliability and data redundancy.”
The hardware provided and set up by Calit2 includes multiple Sun SunFire 4540 high-performance storage servers (Thumpers), multiple 10 Gigabits-per-second network paths to Calit2 HPWREN data, as well as an A10 Load Balancer, with RAM Cache, compression offloads, TCP optimizations and simultaneous connectivity to multiple resource servers.
Some of the most vivid images used on local TV broadcasts during the Harris Fire were from HPWREN’s cameras, most of which are refreshed every two minutes. HPWREN can then string together those images to create time-lapse animations of the progress of a fire over time. In the Harris Fire, neighborhood blogs in the Jamul area that linked to HPWREN’s camera feeds were a lifeline, especially at times when local TV crews were not on the scene. As local resident Tom Dilatus told a writer, the cameras were what kept people in his