PDACS - A Portal for Data Analysis Services for Cosmological Simulations

Accessing and analyzing data from cosmological simulations is a major challenge due to the prohibitive size of cosmological datasets and the diversity of the associated large-scale analysis tasks. Analysis of the simulated models requires direct access to the datasets, considerable compute infrastructure, and storage capacity for the results. Resource limitations can become serious obstacles to performing research on the most advanced cosmological simulations. The Portal for Data Analysis services for Cosmological Simulations (PDACS) is a web-based workflow service and scientific gateway for cosmology. The PDACS platform provides access to shared repositories for datasets, analytical tools, cosmological workflows, and the infrastructure required to perform a wide variety of analyses. PDACS is a repurposed implementation of the Galaxy workflow engine and supports a rich collection of cosmology-specific datatypes and tools. The platform leverages high-performance computing infrastructure at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), enabling researchers to deploy computationally intensive workflows. In this paper we present PDACS and discuss the process and challenges of developing a research platform for cosmological research.