Birds of a Feather

Agriculture Empowered by Supercomputing

Authors: Nicolás Erdödy (Open Parallel Ltd, Multicore World), Arthur Maccabe (University of Arizona, IFDC), Manish Parashar (University of Utah), Nicola Ferrier (Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)), Avinash Sodani (Agrofocal Technologies, Inc.), Channah Rock (University of Arizona, Maricopa Agricultural Center)

Abstract: Agriculture worldwide is facing massive challenges in production, distribution, pollution reduction, and food security and waste: less than 40% of any crop is actually marketed. The farm, the oldest human-engineered system, produces the vast majority of human sustenance and consumes the majority of global freshwater. Its efficient operation is of vital importance -particularly when supply chains are disrupted by wars and pandemics. This BoF will discuss how novel supercomputing technologies and related distributed heterogeneous systems at scale could empower the primary sector and, as a result, stop operating in a needlessly fragile and inefficient way.

Long Description: Description

Agriculture is a sector facing massive challenges in production, distribution, pollution reduction, and food waste: less than 40% of any crop is actually marketed and of all food produced 35%-50% is wasted. The farm, the oldest human-engineered system, produces the vast majority of human sustenance and consumes the majority of global freshwater. In an era of looming food insecurity, water shortages and environmental stresses such as soil erosion, the farm’s efficient operation is of vital importance -particularly when supply chains are disrupted by wars and pandemics. Yet agriculture has not substantially benefited from state-of-the-art IT and related systems, and as a result continues to operate in a needlessly fragile and inefficient way. This BoF will discuss how novel supercomputing technologies and related distributed heterogeneous systems could empower agriculture and dramatically change its value chain and production processes.

Goals

Expose the HPC community to the challenges and opportunities that the agricultural sector and related industries present today and in the future.

Present HPC as part of a solution to complex interactions between e.g. climate change and adaptation; weather forecasting; financial and commodities markets; trade, supply chain and transportation; all intertwined with the strategic and operational decisions to be made at the farm.

Interest professionals from the primary sector in the HPC community and foster interactions.

Attract end-users (farmers, corporations, governments), who are not necessarily familiar with how supercomputing could empower the sector.

Involve indigenous knowledge and challenge technology colonisation while discussing modular solutions adaptable to local conditions.

Core Topic

At first glance, maybe IoT-sensors-edge computing and HPC are opposites, with few shared interests. However, big-data analysis, data-driven simulation and modelling, in-situ data reduction, AI/ML, and even parallel programming models might tightly link very intelligent edge devices and HPC. This BoF will bring together several experts in this new domain and discuss these questions:

* How will multicore edge devices be programmed and maintained in a challenging farm environment?

* Can AI/ML models for HPC be adapted for IoT/edge?

* What novel, low-power hardware can be deployed in the field?

* Is there room for hardware-software co-design at scale to benefit both communities?

* What software technologies from large systems will be transferred to IoT and HPC?

* How will IoT sensors and HPC simulations be coupled?

Relevance to HPC audience

* Any HPC expert in the fields of weather forecasting, climate modelling, complex systems simulations (being equipment, digital twins, applications) as well as biology, genetics, etc, will find this BoF interesting.

* Also will apply to researchers in hardware and software, particularly in I/O, networking, communication within distributed systems, OS, AI, ML, edge computing.

* Professionals that care about power consumption, sustainability, cybersecurity, and projects that can modularly scale from a single user (e.g. individual farm) to large environments (whole catchment, state, nation-wide deployments).

Background

This would be the first edition of this BoF, however we have been working in this direction since SC17 (BoF - “Intersection between IoT and HPC”).

That BoF was full, 120+ attendees.

Website: https://openparallel.com/l2l/bof-sc23/