To enable civil engineers in general and earthquake engineers in particular for research and development of new and innovative analyses methods a novel computing environment for seismic risk assessment of buildings and urban areas was developed as one of the main goals of the ICE4RSIK project (high-throughput computing environment for seismic risk assessment) [1]. The cloud based [2] computing environment developed was reported in several publications [3,4]. To address some of the known issues of the ICE4RISK computing environment it was extended with features of a full cloud platform supporting complete life cycle of building, delivering and managing web applications for seismic risk assessment.

For the underlying system architecture Platform was adopted as a service (PaaS) [5] model of software deployment, allowing us to develop, host, operate, maintain and upgrade software from a central location (web server) for global use. The use of specialised cloud services [6] allows for scalable deployment of applications by providing a web services interface through which researchers can request an arbitrary number of virtual machines, i.e. server instances, on which they can perform the required analyses. In the prototype environment, the local system resides on one server; however, the architecture is scalable so the business logic (different available services, etc.) and data layer can be distributed to different physical servers if the requirements emerge.

This paper provides an overview of the developed PaaS computing environment as well as brief descriptions and discussion of the underlying technologies used in the development of the computing environment. The second part of the paper describes a number of integrated services and applications that enabled different user scenarios.

1

"High-throughput computing environment for seismic risk assessment (ICE4RISK)". http://ice4risk.slo-projekt.info/

2

P. Mell, T. Grance, "The NIST definition of Cloud Computing". http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc

3

I. Perus, R. Klinc, M. Dolenc, M. Dolsek, "A web-based methodology for the prediction of approximate IDA curves", Earthquake eng. struct. dyn., 2012. doi:10.1002/eqe.2192

4

M. Dolenc, R. Klinc, I. Perus, M. Dolsek, "The ICE4RISK Computing Environment", in B.H.V. Topping, J.M. Adam, F.J. Pallarés, R. Bru, M.L. Romero, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Engineering Computational Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 16, 2010. doi:10.4203/ccp.94.16

5

J. Keith, N.L. Burkhard, "The Future of Cloud Computing: Opportunities for European Cloud Computing Beyond 2010", 2010. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/ssai/docs/cloud-report-final.pdf

6

"Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)". http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

purchase the full-text of this paper (price £20)

go to the previous paper
go to the next paper
return to the table of contents
return to the book description
purchase this book (price £50 +P&P)