Ensuring the functioning of the system for forecasting air pollution in the cloud infrastructure by automating the creation of virtual machines

Abstract

The paper improves the web service Povitrya aimed at forecasting air pollution in case of man-made disasters by saving the configured CALPUFF atmospheric transport model in a pre-configured image and integrating into the system of software tools for the automatic creation of virtual machines from a pre-saved image after the user request. To do this, an image based on the Ubuntu operating system was configured in the Ukrainian National Grid Infrastructure, to-gether with the necessary CALPUFF atmospheric transport model libraries. Based on the saved image, one can quickly create and run a virtual machine and start the calculations. After the cal-culation, the Povitrya system removes the virtual machine, freeing up cloud resources for other tasks. The example of test calculations shows that due to the transfer of the module of calcula-tion of atmospheric transport to the cloud infrastructure it was possible to reduce the calculation time of the CALPUFF model by almost 2 times, and the download time of weather forecast data was reduced by more than 10 times. In total, the system calculation time after the user's request was reduced by 4 times for the test configuration. In addition, the resilience of the system to cloud infrastructure failures has been increased. The created archive with the operating system and configured for the CALPUFF model runs can also be transferred to other private clouds (for example, Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure) and their virtual machines could be used. Thus, the developed web system corresponds to modern trends in the implementation of cloud computing technologies, if necessary, allows scaling and can be adapted to other pri-vate or public cloud computing infrastructures. The system is available for registered users by the link: http://cloud-2.bitp.kiev.ua/ airsystem_english/airsystem.html.