Predicting weather and climate and its impacts on the environment, including hazards such as floods and landslides, is a big challenge that can be efficiently supported by a distributed and heterogeneous infrastructure, exploiting several kinds of computational resources: HPC, Grids and Clouds. This can help researchers in speeding up experiments, improve resolution and accuracy, simulate with different numerical models and model chains. Such numerical models are complex with heavy computational requirements, huge numbers of parameters to tune, and not fully standardized interfaces. Hence, each research entity is usually focusing on a limited set of tools and hard-wired solutions to enable their interaction. The DRIHM approach is based on strong standardization, well defined interfaces, and an easy to use web interface for model configuration and experiment definition. A researcher can easily compare outputs from different hydrologic models forced by the same meteorological model, or compare different meteorological models to validate or improve her research. This paper presents the benefit of a web-based interface for hydro-meteorology research through a detailed analysis of the portal (based on liferay-gUse) developed by the DRIHM project.

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The scale and complexity of todays IT-Infrastructures represent a challenge to understand the effects of modifications to these IT-Infrastructures or their components. This motivates the following research question: "How to evaluate high-level, global capability effects induced through lowlevel, local modifications to IT-Infrastructures?". Answering this question requires understanding of IT-Infrastructures in general and especially of their building blocks and of the complex interdependencies and ratios between capabilities, which have to be considered while planning modifications. After further illustrating the environment by providing an exemplary scenario, the question is described in detail. Preliminary results and the next steps to conduct on the way to answer the above mentioned research question are presented.

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