Report on September Hydrology & Hydraulics Conferences

Last month, Daniel Maren and Fernando Fuentes of our business development team represented Galileo as a sponsor of two important H&H (Hydrology and Hydraulics) conferences:

• The Floodplain Management Association (FMA) Annual Conference in San Diego, Sept. 3-6  
•  The Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) in Orlando, Sept. 8-12 

Daniel Maren and Fernando Fuentes at the Galileo booth

Their meetings and conversations at both conferences provided excellent insights as to how Galileo can continue to serve the H&H community in an even more powerful way. It was clear, from sessions and discussions related to compute at both conferences, that the conversation around computational resources is of interest to the community.

Fernando and Daniel were incredibly impressed by software firms developing H&H-specific modeling software. Galileo is a tool meant to complement these software offerings. With developments in 2D and generally more demanding modeling (such as monte carlo/ensemble analysis), H&H engineers are definitely thinking about more powerful machines and how to access them. 

When Fernando and Daniel returned from the conferences, they were excited to share their findings with the wider Galileo team. As the first company to ‘containerize’ HEC-RAS–making remote execution of the RAS engine easier than ever–, we were particularly interested in the conference sessions dedicated to HEC-RAS modeling. At the conferences, they learned that increasing adoption of Galileo is dovetailing nicely with increasing adoption of HEC-RAS as opposed to alternative simulation software. As we’ve seen with the release of HEC-RAS 5.0, every new version is increasingly sophisticated, including improved 2D functionality. As a result, more modelers are using HEC-RAS for 2D modeling. 

Three cutting-edge applications for RAS widely discussed at the conferences are rain-on-grid modeling, ‘modern’ inundation mapping, and ‘modern’ dam breach analysis.  Modern analysis should be understood as probabilistic analysis or, more generally, increasingly complex 2D models of the breach. Galileo is the perfect solution for these computationally intensive workloads, as well as other models that are large, spatially dynamic, or include a relatively long simulation time frame.

The team also confirmed that Galileo is a particularly attractive solution for H&H firms for the management of on-prem private cloud configurations. In this context, Galileo acts as the administrative and management layer for a firm’s own heterogeneous computational resources, located in one or multiple different offices.

Reception hall at FMA

Galileo additionally functions as a portal to pay-as-you-go cloud resources, eliminating the need to set up cloud and helping engineers avoid potential IT nightmares. This feature has been especially interesting for smaller teams and firms seeking to avoid capital expenditures and underutilized owned resources. Galileo allows them to tap into the cloud in one click.

One final exciting piece of information for us was news of FEMA’s MAP (Risk Mapping, Assessment and Planning) program for flood hazard mapping, part of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). More on that in a future post!