NSF Cyberinfrastructure Grants Awarded
The Databases and Information Systems (DBIS) group is involved in two NSF awards for Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories (CEOP):
CEOP/COMET: Profs. Gertz (PI) and Ludäscher from the CS department and an interdisciplinary team of researchers from UC Davis, including Profs. Schladow (Tahoe Environmental Research Center), Ustin (UC Davis Center of Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, Environment), and Williams (Bodega Marine Laboratory), have received a three year $2,100,000 grant under the NSF program Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories: Prototype Systems to Address Cross-Cutting Needs.
CEOP/KEPLER: A team of investigators from UC Santa Barbara (Matt Jones, Mark Schildhauer), UC Davis (Prof. Ludäscher), UC San Diego (Ilkay Altintas, Chaitan Baru), UC Los Angeles (Prof. Deborah Estrin), and OPeNDAP Inc. (Peter Cornillon) have been awarded a four year $2,700,000 grant for the Management and Analysis of Environmental Observatory Data using the Kepler Scientific Workflow System.
The goal of the project called "COMET: Coast-to-Mountain Environmental Transect" is to develop a practical cyberinfrastructure prototype to facilitate the study of the way in which multiple environmental factors, including climatic variability, affect major ecosystems along an elevation gradient from coastal California to the summit of the Sierra Nevada. An understanding of the coupling between the strength of the California upwelling system and terrestrial ecosystem carbon exchange is the central scientific question. Additional scientific goals are to better understand the way in which atmospheric dust is transported to Lake Tahoe and an examination of carbon flux in the coastal zone as moderated by upwelling processes. The geographic context is one in which there is a diversity of ecosystems that are believed to be sensitive to climatological changes.
The dispersion and complexity of the data needed to answer the scientific questions motivate the development of a state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure to facilitate the scientific research. This cyberinfrastructure will be based around the integration of access to distributed and varied data collections and sensor data streams, semantic registration of data, models and analysis tools, semantically-aware data query mechanisms, and an orchestration system for advanced scientific workflows. Access to this cyberinfrastructure will be provided through a Web-based portal.
CEOP/KEPLER: Data streams from sensor networks in the environment are made available via a real-time data grid infrastructure which a system engineer can monitor and control (topleft). Scientists can then design and execute hybrid models that feed from and compare to real-time observational data (top-middle).
The goal of CEOP/KEPLER is to provide scientists with an analysis and modeling tool that can easily integrate distributed heterogeneous data streams for use in simulation and forecast models. This near real-time environment for analytical processing will provide an open-source, extensible and customizable framework for designing and executing scientific models that consume data streams from sensor networks. Project investigators will combine the real-time data grid being constructed through other projects (COMET, ROADNet, CENS ESS, OPeNDAP, SEEK) with the scientific workflow system Kepler.
These open-source software frameworks represent considerable prior investments. Kepler will be extended to meet the needs of scientists that analyze and model observatory data, systems engineers that create and maintain observatory sensor networks, and the public that accesses data and results from observatories (cf. figure). Science use cases driving will be elaborated through community workshops and focus, e.g., on predictive modeling to examine the role of an insect vectored pathogen in exotic plant invasion.