Building design has been revolutionised in recent years. New materials and better construction techniques have allowed bespoke and impressive public spaces to be created. Consider the Millennium Dome, Hong Kong airport, or the 2012 Olympic stadium.

These bespoke spaces represent a significant challenge for fire safety. Unlike for conventional buildings, with regular layouts and dimensions, there is very little experience to suggest how fires might develop in these spaces, and how people might react in an emergency situation.

An Edinburgh-led consortium, called FireGrid, is developing technology designed to tackle this specific problem head-on. By combining advanced modelling with sensor data, in a high performance computing (HPC) context, the FireGrid team are developing a system that can provide fire fighters with better information to support their response, to control the impact of a fire emergency, and to reduce the risk to life and property.

In this talk we will review progress of the FireGrid consortium and describe a technology prototype that has been built to demonstrate the potential for such a system, and to stress some of the key technologies that are required.