EarthCube IA: Collaborative Proposal: EarthCube Integration & Test Environment

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EarthCube is supporting the creation of interoperable tools and services for Earth science research, but no environment currently exists for integration and testing of these components. The EarthCube Integration and Test Environment (ECITE), an outgrowth of activities of the EarthCube Testbed Working Group. The ECITE approach focuses on integrating existing effective technologies and resources as well as capabilities being built by the EarthCube community to provide a federated and interoperable test environment. ECITE?s nationwide cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences will also advance the understanding of regional cyberinfrastructure and collaborative geosciences across geographic locations and disciplines by contributing relevant scheduling tools and a working integration and testing environment. A hallmark of the ECITE effort will be engagement of scientists and technologists from multiple disciplines and geographic regions across the geosciences community to develop requirements, prototype, design, build, and test an integration test-bed that will support cross-disciplinary research. The multi-disciplinary ECITE team is led by Sara Graves of the University of Huntsville in Alabama (UAH) and includes participants from all areas of the United States. ECITE activities will enable EarthCube to further support other members and contribute leadership to the broader scientific community. The ECITE federated Integration and Test (I&T) environment has the potential to scale and extend to an NSF wide integration and test capability that can serve as a model and example for other agencies. The proposed ECITE functionality is vital to ensure that the broader goals of the EarthCube are achieved.The ECITE team will actively engage EarthCube and the wider geosciences community in definition of requirements, design, and testing of the system. ECITE will consist of a seamless federated system of scalable and location independent distributed computational resources (nodes) across the US. The hybrid federated system will provide a robust set of distributed resources to include both public and private cloud capabilities. The nodes will provide compute and storage resources requiring minimal system administration.ECITE is an important step in ensuring that EarthCube components will be able to work together to provide a successful framework that can continue to evolve to meet the needs of the geosciences community. This research addresses timely issues of integration, test and evaluation methodologies and best practices with a strong interoperability theme to advance disciplinary research through the integration of diverse and heterogeneous data, algorithms, systems and sciences. The results and findings will provide guidance for EarthCube evolution and future integration efforts. The ECITE team aims to make the Integration and Test (I&T) environment easy to use and readily available to the EarthCube community. Access to the resulting platform will enable and encourage the EarthCube community to develop prototypes, try out new technologies, and to share ideas, concepts and experiments