Natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts may be rare but the first half of 2011 has shown how catastrophic they can be. So what is being done to monitor these behemoths? With the help of powerful computing infrastructures, researchers are developing better tools for just that.

Their work produces (among much else) a tracking system for meteorites, an early warning system for earth quakes using the registrations from hundreds of micro-electromechanical devices and a system that detects the first signs of forest fire from the images of remotely-controled cameras in combination with meteorological and historical-geographic data.

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