A platform for data handling, analysis and evaluation of environmental engineering issues and simulation control

Abstract

Computer clusters are getting more and more employed for highly demanding computational tasks in environmental engineering, as the new parallel computing technologies are improving steadily and have attained a high standard. Nevertheless, for a task to execute in a cluster, it needs to be written following paradigms of parallelism, which is not necessarily dominated by the implementer of a specific problem, such as analysis of meteorological data, simulation of pollution dispersion among many others. Therefore, the aim of this work is to develop a computer platform capable of parallelizing, manipulating, analyzing and evaluating meteorological observational data and controlling simulation. Task specific features can be added to the platform through plugins, rendering it flexible and extensible for a large range of tasks. A simple plugin was created to validate and evaluate the functionality of the platform with satisfactory results. The test application considers a simple function to carry out the calculation of the four statistical moments (mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) of a given variable in a given time scale. Despite its simplicity, this plugin can already be used for exploring the relevance of some variables in order to use this information in a procedure for data reduction.