HR: 08:45h
AN: IN31C-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Cyberinfrastructure for Rapid Prototyping Capability
AU: * Haupt, T A
EM: haupt@cavs.msstate.edu
AF: Mississippi State University, CAVS, Box 5405, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States
AU: Kalyanasundaram, A
EM: anand@cavs.msstate.edu
AF: Mississippi State University, CAVS, Box 5405, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States
AU: Zhuk, I
EM: igorzhuk@cavs.msstate.edu
AF: Mississippi State University, CAVS, Box 5405, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States
AU: Goli, V
EM: vamsi@cavs.msstate.edu
AF: Mississippi State University, CAVS, Box 5405, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States
AB: The overall goal of the NASA Rapid Prototyping Capability is to speed the evaluation of potential uses of NASA research products and technologies to improve future operational systems by reducing the time to access, configure, and assess the effectiveness of NASA products and technologies. The infrastructure to support the RPC is thus expected to provide the capability to rapidly evaluate innovative methods of linking science observations. The RPC infrastructure supports two major categories of experiments (and subsequent analysis): comparing results of a particular model as fed with data coming from different sources, and comparing different models using the data coming from the same source. In spite of being conceptually simple, two use cases in fact entail a significant technical challenge. Enabling RPC experiments requires thus a radical simplification of access to both actual and simulated data, as well as tools for data pre- and post-processing. The tools must be interoperable, allowing the user to create computational workflows with the data seamlessly transferred as needed, including third-party transfers to high-performance computing platforms. In addition, the provenance of the data must be preserved in order to document results of different what-if scenarios and to enable collaboration and data sharing between users. The functionality of the RPC splits into several independent modules such as interactive Web site, data server, tool's interfaces, or monitoring service. Each such module is implemented as an independent portlet. The RPC Portal aggregates the different contents provided by the portlets into a single interface employing a popular GridSphere portlet container. The RPC data access is based on Unidata's THREDDS Data server (TDS) extended to support, among others, interactive creation of containers for new data collections and uploading new data sets, downloading the data either to the user desktop or transferring it to a remote location using gridFTP, displaying the provenance of datasets, and invoking tools for the selected files. To enable performing experiments, RPC supports three types of tools integrated with TDS: (1) Standalone tools capable of connecting to the RPC data server to browse datasets, but otherwise performing all operations independently of the RPC infrastructure; (2) Transformations that take a dataset or a collection as an input, and output the transformed files, such as HEG, MRT, ART, and TSPT; (3) The data viewers and statistical analysis tools which do not produce new datasets.
DE: 0525 Data management
DE: 0530 Data presentation and visualization
DE: 0550 Model verification and validation
DE: 0599 General or miscellaneous
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting