Science Gateways for Enhancing Earthquake Science

Date: 4/24/2019

Time: 04:15 PM

Room: Elliott Bay

Science gateways are Web interfaces and middleware that both simplify access to supercomputers and expand the capabilities of their users through graphical user interfaces. Since initially conceived two decades ago, science gateways have matured into production services used daily by many scientists. For example, science gateway users of XSEDE supercomputers consistently outnumber regular command line users.

We believe there is a need and an opportunity to dramatically increase the use of gateways and related cyberinfrastructure in earthquake science. This can be done in three related ways: by simplifying access to popular modeling and simulating tools, by providing better mechanisms for interacting with data products such as InSAR and GPS data, and by enabling novel applications of machine learning technologies that are outside the expertise of many geoscientists to geophysical data sets.

In this talk we introduce general science gateway concepts, provide an overview of the NASA-funded GeoGateway project, and describe how GeoGateway will evolve as we align it with the Apache Airavata framework for science gateways. We are developing GeoGateway as a means for geoscientists to access, integrate, and share multiple data sets, including InSAR, GPS, seismicity, and optical data. GeoGateway provides more than access to data sets: by coupling data to modeling and simulation codes, it enables users to easily incorporate data into their computational experiments.

It is important to develop GeoGateway’s capabilities within a general framework in order that we can take advantage of features already available from other science gateways. At the same time, GeoGateway has unique or forward-looking capabilities compared to many gateways, so innovations made by GeoGateway can be contributed back to open source science gateway frameworks. We thus describe the synergies between GeoGateway and the Apache Airavata framework for building science gateways, and how Apache Airavata can be used to build other science gateways.

Presenting Author: Marlon Pierce

Authors