Collaborative Proposal: Frameworks: Project Tapis: Next Generation Software for Distributed Research

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The goal of a robust cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem is to become a catalyst for discovery and innovation by fostering the development of software frameworks as sustainable production-quality services. Modern science and engineering research increasingly span multiple, geographically distributed data centers and leverage instruments, experimental facilities and a network of national and regional CI. The Tapis framework will enable scientists to accomplish computational and data intensive research in a secure, scalable, and reproducible way allowing scientists to focus on their research instead of the technology needed to accomplish it. Tapis will allow easier implementation, sharing and re-use of complex computational applications, workflows, and infrastructure and enable analysis previously too challenging for researchers. The framework will maximize application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of geographically distributed computational workloads, offer a web-based science-as-a-service to enable multi-facility, decentralized deployments, and provide production-grade support for sensors and streaming data. Tapis will impact multiple science domains, geographic and underrepresented communities with the potential to tackle the world's most important scientific problems spanning astronomy, climate science, medicine, natural hazards, and sustainability science. Education and outreach will include sponsored workshops, hackathons and training materials covering the platform and providing examples to encourage widespread adoption for users across a variety of technical skills and targeting the next generation of young researchers and professionals through immersive workshops and professional development opportunities.Tapis, will be a new platform for distributed computational experiments that leverages NSF's investments in the Agave, Abaco and CHORDS projects. The Tapis software framework will 1) provide production-grade support for sensors and streaming data, 2) maximize application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of computational workloads across geographically distributed providers, and 3) provide science-as-a-service HTTP-based RESTful APIs to enable multi-facility, decentralized deployments that are both secure and scalable. Working alongside a diverse set of domain researchers to drive real-world use cases, Tapis will be the underlying cyberinfrastructure for computational workflows and science gateways. Tapis will leverage containers to maximize application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of computational workloads across geographically distributed providers. The project will achieve this flexibility by introducing execution system capabilities and application requirements throughout the framework. The Jobs service will be run in a distributed manner to take advantage of data locality and, optionally, to schedule jobs on underutilized systems. Tapis will deploy in centralized or distributed configurations using a microservices architecture that includes a novel, decentralized security and authorization kernel. This kernel can be deployed on-premises to retain local control over confidential data. Custom microservices can be plugged into the security kernel to provide new capabilities, resulting in a cyberinfrastructure ecosystem for distributed computing. To effectively execute Tapis, teams from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the University of Texas at Austin (UT), and the University of Hawaii (UH) will leverage a long-standing collaboration to support investigator-driven, geographically distributed, data-intensive research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.