From Data to Models and Analytics: An Integrated Scientific Computing Platform to Accelerate Environmental Research SBIR Phase I (Final Technical Report)
Phase I research was conducted to investigate the technical feasibility of an integrated open source platform GeoLib to provide turnkey solutions for model-data integration for environmental systems science (ESS), using modern web technologies, advances in HPC and cloud computing and high-performance visualization. A key feature of our platform is that it minimizes and automates data movement between data storage and computing systems. Another critical feature of the design is that it enables users to perform high-fidelity post-processing by performing high-performance visualization server-side and in-situ on the compute cluster close to the data. The investigation, which was performed over a 12-month period ending April 2019, centered on developing prototype software to demonstrate the key enabling technologies required for this system. This included: (i) rapid access to data from multiple remote sources, via a unified data interface; (ii) software for scalable geospatial visualization of raster, vector, and point cloud data on the web; (iii) development of an easy-to-use API for creating simulation and modeling workflows; (iv) remote data visualization and processing on middle-tier servers; and (v) remote data processing on high-performance computing systems. A critical part of this work is that all of these capabilities be accessible to end users through standard desktop tools such as Project Jupyter, which is widely adopted for ESS simulation and modeling.