Advancing Technology for Big Ocean Science through Partnership and Open Source

Transitioning an innovative technology from research to operations can be a daunting effort. This particularly the case when the technology is a software solution for the cloud environment. This is because operation readiness level cannot be elevated simply through technical improvement alone. In addition to the continuous technology refinement, the project team must also address the technology’s sustainability through its ease of deployment and upgrades, cost of operation, and completeness of its documentations. OceanWorks is a NASA technology integration project to establish an Integrated Ocean Science Data Analytics Platform at NASA’s Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) for big ocean science. As a technology integration and advancement project, the team is chartered to create a coherent architecture to streamline the flow of science data and information, and address resource sharing through services consolidation. The team also needs to address the deployment through orchestration and containerization on the cloud. Our goals include improve the ease of deployment, improve the overall system manageability, and reduce the operating cost on the cloud. Through partnership with other NASA-sponsored projects and the Apache Software Foundation, the team was able to advance the maturity of the technology significantly in a very short period. The project established the open source Apache Science Data Analytics Platform (SDAP) (https://sdap.apache.org) to develop in the open under an internationally-recognized open source governance structure. This presentation discusses our lessons learned in developing the OceanWorks as the game changer for ocean science research through partnership and open sourcing.