Rajesh Kalyanam

iData: a community geospatial data sharing environment to support data-driven science

With the advent of XSEDE, the national cyberinfrastructure has evolved from a set of traditional HPC resources to a broader range of digital services. Science gateways, which serve as portals to scientific applications, have also evolved as researchers are dealing with rapidly expanding scientific datasets and the increasingly complex workflows. More and more gateways are being developed to support integrated services for running data-driven applications on HPC resources such as those on XSEDE. To facilitate this type of workflow, there is a pressing need for web-based data management systems that are easy to use, support data upload, sharing, access and management, and can be integrated with advanced computation and storage resources. More importantly such systems need to be accessible by users from the broad research and education communities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of iData, a web-based community data publishing and sharing system. iData supports both generic file-based data collections and several commonly used environmental data collection formats including time series, GIS vector and raster data. Integrated data processing, visualization and filtering capabilities are provided for these data formats. Currently iData can be downloaded and deployed in a HUBzero-based gateway, and we plan to make it available for non-HUBzero platforms in the future. We present two examples in which iData has been successfully used to support research collaboration in driNET and GEOSHARE projects.

A Web Service-Enabled Distributed Workflow System for Scientific Data Processing

This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed data-driven workflow system on top of the TeraGrid infrastructure. The workflow system is based on a data management architecture that provides easy access to scientific data collections via the TeraGrid network. The workflow system allows researchers to construct scientific workflows for data discovery, access, transformation, and analysis. The system leverages JOpera, an open-source workflow engine and visual composer, as well as a set of Web service-based data and computation modules. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we create an end-to-end climate simulation data analysis workflow that connects the data management architecture to TeraGrid computation resources. We also develop a workflow monitoring service to keep track of distributed workflow execution

Cloud-enabling a Collaborative Research Platform: The GABBs Story

Modern cyberinfrastructures typically involve tightly integrated compute, storage and web application resources. They also form the basis of science gateways, which add their own science-specific processing or visualization capabilities. While some science gateways are intended as the central resource provider for a certain scientific community, others provide generic capabilities that are intended for further customization at each installation site. However, replicating their setup is a non-trivial task often involving specific operating system, software package and configuration choices while also requiring allocation of the actual physical computing resources. Cloud computing provides an attractive alternative, simplifying resource provision and enabling reliable replication. We describe our ongoing efforts to cloud-enable a geospatial science gateway hosting general-purpose software building blocks termed GABBs, that provide geospatial data management, analysis, visualization and processing capabilities. We describe the various compute and storage resources and software underlying these building blocks and our automation of the deployment, software installation and configuration of this science gateway on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. Some of the challenges that were encountered and resolved during this cloud-enabling process are also described.

Introducing Research Concepts to Middle School Students via a Geospatial Science Gateway

Tools developed for the Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks (GABBs) project that are available on MyGeoHub.org have been used for a geospatial experience for middle school students at Turned Onto Technology & Leadership (TOTAL) summer camps at Purdue University during 2016 and 2017. Thirty to thirty-six middle school students from diverse backgrounds and from around the United States used one such tool, MultiSpec Online to determine the area of a flood which occurred in June 2008 in southern Illinois and Indiana using Landsat 5 multispectral satellite data. The students also got hands-on experience using the GeoBuilder tool to find locations within Indiana with the highest reported rain events. The students received introductions to remote sensing, Geobuilder and MultiSpec Online during a one-day session and the following day they participated in a 75-minute active learning session to work through the exercises. The GABBs team worked closely with the students in multiple sessions helping them with technical questions and at the same time, collecting valuable feedback in how to improve the tools. At the end of the session for the second year, the students completed a four-question evaluation form to provide structured feedback. It was clear that the students were much more excited about the active learning session than the introduction (presentation) session.

Social Media Modeling of Human Behavior in Natural Emergencies

During natural emergencies (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, storms), individuals can choose to avoid or leave areas of risk. Yet, often people choose to stay or travel to danger areas. Some may underestimate the danger; others may want to protect their property or families. Widespread social media use by these individuals can help us understand their motives and quantify their likelihood to engage in risky travel or decisions to stay. Social media data in such situations is not unlike sensor data; by tracking where individuals go and what they tweet about we can discover both temporal and spatial trends in human emotion and behavior during weather events. In this paper, we describe our extensible, distributed, real-time data collection and analysis pipeline that combines public streaming data from the National Weather Service and Twitter for subsequent exploration and analysis, including risk behavior modeling. Our pipeline leverages the open-source Apache Storm framework and the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack to process, filter, augment and index this streaming data for subsequent efficient retrieval. This work, which can be expanded to other social media (Facebook, Flickr, Instagram) is pathbreaking in several respects; first, it represents a novel integration of weather and social media data; second, our pipeline can be easily adapted to other analyzes by adding or removing processing components; and finally, this work represents the first (to our knowledge) quantification of human risk behavior using social media data in the form of average vectors and individual risk behavior indicators.

Try-CybSI: An Extensible Cybersecurity Learning and Demonstration Platform

The increasing use of web applications for tasks such as banking, social media, and travel reservations and the frequent news of hacker attacks has brought cybersecurity to the forefront of public discussion. It is vital to ensure that the new generation of programmers is aware of the importance of cybersecurity and the various solutions in existence that address these issues. While college instructional programs incorporate optional courses on cybersecurity, the enrolled students may not receive sufficient hands-on experience or have access to resources that foster writing secure code. The goal of the Try-CybSI project is to provide a web platform that demonstrates various cybersecurity flaws and solutions, while providing users with access to containerized environments to explore and develop secure coding practices. We believe that this platform can be incorporated as a requirement in college instruction and security certification programs. In addition, researchers can contribute new applications to the platform that will enable them to publicize their work while supporting research reproducibility.