Collaboration Work Bench

The Earth science Collaborative Workbench (CWB) will eliminate many barriers for science research by augmenting a scientist's current research environment and tool set to allow him to easily share diverse data and algorithms. The CWB leverages evolving technologies such as commodity computing and social networking to design an architecture for scalable collaboration that supports an emerging vision of an Earth Science Collaboratory. The project team is implementing the CWB on the open source Eclipse framework, to be compatible with widely used scientific analysis tools such as IDL. The Catalog built into CWB captures and tracks metadata and provenance about data and algorithms for the researchers in a non-intrusive manner, with minimal overhead. Seamless interfaces to multiple Cloud services support sharing algorithms, data, and analysis results, as well as access to storage and compute resources. A Community Catalog tracks the use of shared science artifacts and manage collaborations among researchers. The team is assembling components into three prototype systems targeting accelerated science algorithm development, with increasing Cloud integration in each prototype. The Science investigators, with their colleagues among the widely distributed algorithm development teams, will evaluate analysis and collaboration capabilities of each prototype for NASA's upcoming Global Precipitation Monitoring (GPM) mission.