The Community Coordinated Modeling Center - An Evolving Cyberinfrastructure for the Space Science Community

Abstract:

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center was established in 2000 as an essential element of the National Space Weather Program and was designed to be a long-term & flexible solution to the Research-to-Operations (R2O) transition problem. Over its 15-year existence, the CCMC has changed how state-of-the-art space weather models are utilized in research, and has also facilitated the transition of many research models into operational environments. The CCMC currently hosts a large and expanding collection of physics-based space weather models that have been developed by the international research community, and has amassed a peta-byte of model simulation output that represents advances in space weather modeling and space science research for the past 15 years.

The ability of the CCMC to engage the international research community and support community challenges, campaigns, studies, and general research is vital to its success - so a flexible cyberinfrastructure that facilitates data discovery and interoperability with external systems is a necessity. There are many challenges associated with supporting a large number of disparate, physics-based models and the computational infrastructure to support them. This paper will highlight the CCMC’s past, present, and future computational infrastructure, and showcase several examples of how the CCMC continues to support many self-organized efforts in the space science community.