While the everything as a sensor is a typical data gathering pattern in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in contexts such as smart cities, smart factories, and precision agriculture, among others, the use of the same technique in the coastal marine environment is still not explored at full potential. Nevertheless, when it comes to maritime scenarios, the application of IoT and networks of distributed sensors and actuators are still limited, even though the development of marine electronics and extreme network technologies are present for decades also in this area. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of the Internet of Floating Things (IoFT), which extends the IoT to the maritime scenario. Next, we present our latest implementation of the DYNAMO (Distributed leisure Yachts sensor Network for Atmosphere and Marine Observations) system, a framework for coastal data collection from sensors and devices deployed in marine equipment. To demonstrate the importance of IoFT data collection in the real-world environmental science context, we consider a scientific workflow for coastal water quality. The selected application focuses on predicting the spatial and temporal pattern of sea pollutants and their possible presence and time of persistence in the proximity of mussel farm areas in the Bay of Pozzuoli in Italy. The pollutants are simple Lagrangian particles, so the ocean dynamics play an important role in the simulation. Our results show that integrating crowdsourced bathymetry data in the workflow numerical model setup improves the accuracy of the final results, allowing for a more detailed spatial distribution pattern of the sea current driving the Lagrangian tracers.
8 September 2017 in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience
Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have been at the leading edge of increasing parallelism over the last 10 years. This fact has encouraged the use of GPUs in a broader range of applications, where developers are required to lever age this technology with new programming models which ease the task of writing programs to run efficiently on GPUs. In this paper, we discuss the main guidelines to assist the developer when porting sequential scientific code on modern GPUs. These guidelines were carried out by porting the L-BFGS, the (Limited memory-) BFGS algorithm for large scale optimization, available as Harwell routine VA15. The specific interest in the L-BFGS algorithm arises from the fact that this is the computational module with the longest running time of a Oceanographic Data Assimilation application software, on which some of the authors are working.