Rapid Prototyping Capabilities for Conducting Research of Sun-Earth System

This paper describes the requirements, design and implementation progress of an e-Science environment to enable rapid evaluation of potential uses of NASA research products and technologies to improve future operational systems for societal benefits. This project is intended to be a low-cost effort focused on integrating existing open source, public domain, and/or community developed software components and tools. Critical for success is a carefully designed implementation plan allowing for incremental enhancement of the scale and functionality of the system while maintaining an operational the system and hardening its implementation. This has been achieved by rigorously following the principles of separation of concerns, loose coupling, and service oriented architectures employing Portlet (GridSphere), Service Bus (ServiceMix), and Grid (Globus) technologies, as well as introducing a new layer on top of the THREDDS data server. At the current phase, the system provide data access through a data explorer allowing the user to view the metadata and provenance of the datasets, invoke data transformations such as subsampling, reprojections, format translations, and de-clouding of selected data sets or collections, as well as generate simulated data sets approximating data feed from future NASA missions.