An ad-hoc file system accelerated workflow application for accidental fire fast response

Accidental fires present a significant and growing threat to ecosystems, communities, and economies worldwide. This paper presents the development and implementation of Smoketracer, a novel on-demand application empowered by advanced computational workflows for fast response to accidental fire and effects mitigation. The DAGonStar workflow engine orchestrates the application leveraging a brand-new ad-hoc file system, turning the workflow:// schema used to define the tasks' data dependencies into an actual user-space distributed in-RAM storage. Although the evaluation results of the DAGon File System (DAGonFS) are still preliminary, the performance of file copy operations is from 31% up to 63% faster than the baseline (shared scratch directory hosted on mechanical hard drives). The accidental fires application wall clock is reduced by 57% when using the DAGonFS on four data nodes.