Leveraging the Cloud for Wind Research

The Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e) initiative is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Program initiative designed to optimize the performance of wind power plants to lower the levelized cost of energy (LCOE). The Data Archive and Portal, managed by PNNL and hosted on Amazon Web Services, is a key capability of the A2e initiative. It has been established to collect, store, catalog, preserve and disseminate results from the experimental and computational efforts  (both open and proprietary datasets) conducted under the A2e initiative for a diverse range of users. (http://a2e.pnnl.gov). The Data Archive and Portal (DAP) establishes protocols and data access for massive datasets with the quality needed for scientific discovery. In collaboration with several institutions and national laboratories, a DOE Wind Cloud currently has been built that will act as the single hub for A2e data and metadata. The DAP has been built with single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to access data. All facilities involved in storing wind data would have the ability to store and manipulate data inside the Wind Cloud. The Wind Cloud would facilitate big data services and database capabilities to handle very large datasets and high-fidelity models. To accommodate multiple access types, from highly sensitive proprietary to publicly available data, a flexible security system has been designed and developed. This poster will showcase the architecture and security layers of the DAP using cloud solutions.