Natural disasters can cause huge loss of life, enormous amounts of property damage to the local communities. Although it is impossible to avoid the natural disasters, human sufferings can be reduced by adopting information technologies to the disaster response missions. In this paper, a web-based 3D visualization and cluster computing system was developed to facilitate and expedite the resource distribution process during a disaster. Our disaster management system utilizes state-of-the-art computing cluster with 16 nodes of Intel Xeon-E5 processors (16 cores per node) to process the emergency supply requests from the disaster victims, and calculate the optimal resource distribution routes with the consideration of the damaged transportation infrastructures. The optimized resource distribution problem was solved with distributed all pair shortest path algorithm and the vehicle routing algorithm. The web-based 3D visualization system was developed with Google earth engine to display the disaster areas, affected households and resource distribution routes. The computation result from the cluster was automatically uploaded to the web-based 3D visualization system, enabling the users to immediately see the optimal resource distribution routes in a virtual 3D environment. The visualization system is flexible and can be easily adapted to a Google earth enabled mobile devices, desktop monitors as well as a Cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE). A historical disaster data from the Northwest Indiana was used to demonstrate the functionalities of the developed system.
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