IN51C-04
Clearing your Desk! Software and Data Services for Collaborative Web Based GIS Analysis
Friday, 18 December 2015: 08:43
2020 (Moscone West)
David G Tarboton1, Ray Idaszak2, Jeffery S Horsburgh3, Daniel P Ames4, Jonathan L Goodall5, Lawrence E Band6, Venkatesh Merwade7, Alva Couch8, Richard P Hooper9, David R Maidment10, Pabitra K Dash3, Michael Stealey2 and Hong Yi2, (1)Utah State University, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Logan, UT, United States, (2)Renaissance Computing Institute, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, (3)Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States, (4)Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, United States, (5)University of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville, VA, United States, (6)University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, (7)Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States, (8)Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrological Science, Water Data Center, Washington, DC, United States, (9)Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrological Science, President and CEO, Washington, DC, United States, (10)CRWR, Austin, TX, United States
Abstract:
Can your desktop computer crunch the large GIS datasets that are becoming increasingly common across the geosciences? Do you have access to or the know-how to take advantage of advanced high performance computing (HPC) capability? Web based cyberinfrastructure takes work off your desk or laptop computer and onto infrastructure or "cloud" based data and processing servers. This talk will describe the HydroShare collaborative environment and web based services being developed to support the sharing and processing of hydrologic data and models. HydroShare supports the upload, storage, and sharing of a broad class of hydrologic data including time series, geographic features and raster datasets, multidimensional space-time data, and other structured collections of data. Web service tools and a Python client library provide researchers with access to HPC resources without requiring them to become HPC experts. This reduces the time and effort spent in finding and organizing the data required to prepare the inputs for hydrologic models and facilitates the management of online data and execution of models on HPC systems. This presentation will illustrate the use of web based data and computation services from both the browser and desktop client software. These web-based services implement the Terrain Analysis Using Digital Elevation Model (TauDEM) tools for watershed delineation, generation of hydrology-based terrain information, and preparation of hydrologic model inputs. They allow users to develop scripts on their desktop computer that call analytical functions that are executed completely in the cloud, on HPC resources using input datasets stored in the cloud, without installing specialized software, learning how to use HPC, or transferring large datasets back to the user's desktop. These cases serve as examples for how this approach can be extended to other models to enhance the use of web and data services in the geosciences.
