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Virtual Geophysics Laboratory: Enabling a scientific marketplace Ryan Fraser1, Terry Rankine2, Josh Vote3, Robert Woodcock4 1CSIRO, Perth, Australia, [email protected] 2CSIRO, Perth, Australia, [email protected] 3CSIRO, Perth, Australia, [email protected] 4CSIRO, Canberra, Australia, [email protected] VIRTUAL GEOPHYSICS LABORATORY Over the last five decades geoscientists from Australian state and federal agencies have collected and assembled around 3 Petabytes of geoscience data sets under public funding. As a consequence of technological progress, data is now being acquired at exponential rates and in higher resolution than ever before. Effective use of these big data sets challenges the workflow, storage and computational infrastructure of most organisations. The Virtual Geophysics Laboratory (VGL) is a scientific workflow portal that addresses some of these issues by providing Australian geophysicists with access to a Web based, integrated environment that exploits eResearch tools and Cloud computing technology, and promotes collaboration between scientists. VGL simplifies and automates large portions of what were previously manually intensive scientific workflow processes, allowing scientists to focus on their specific contribution rather than all aspects of an experiment. A number of geophysical processing codes are incorporated to support multiple workflows. For example a gravity inversion can be performed by combining the Escript/Finley codes (from the University of Queensland) with the gravity data (from Geoscience Australia) registered in VGL. Likewise, tectonic processes can also be modelled by combining the Underworld code (from Monash University) with one of the various 3D models available to VGL. Cloud services provide scalable and cost effective compute resources. VGL's "mix and match" approach to data, computational resources and scientific codes, enables a dynamic approach to scientific collaboration. VGL allows scientists to publish their specific contribution, be it data, code, compute or work flow, knowing the VGL framework will provide other components needed for a complete application. Other scientists can choose the pieces that suit them best to assemble an experiment. The coarse grain workflow of the VGL framework combined with the flexibility of the scripting library and computational toolboxes allows for significant customisation and sharing amongst the community. VGL is built on top of mature standards-compliant information services, many deployed using the Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS), which provides direct access to geophysical data. A large number of data sets from Geoscience Australia and AuScope partners assist users in accessing suitable data. GeoNetwork provides a metadata catalogue to store workflow results for future use, discovery and provenance tracking. The scientific software is packaged into toolboxes that can be run on the NeCTAR Cloud. VGL has been developed in collaboration with the research community using incremental software development practices and open source tools. While developed to provide the geophysics research community with a sustainable platform and scalable infrastructure; VGL has also developed a number of concepts, patterns and generic components which have been reused for cases beyond geophysics, including natural hazards, satellite processing and other areas requiring spatial data discovery and processing. Future plans for VGL include a number of improvements in both functional and non-functional areas in response to its user community needs and advancement in information technologies. In particular, research is underway in the following areas (a) distributed and parallel workflow processing in the cloud, (b) seamless integration with various cloud providers, and (c) integration with virtual laboratories representing other science domains. Figure 1: VGL provides map interface for data discovery and subset selection Figure 2: Toolboxes and Cloud providers can be selected for running experiments Brisbane | Australia 20–25 Oct | 2013 7th eResearch Australasia Conference ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VGL was developed by CSIRO in collaboration with AuScope, Geoscience Australia, National Computational Infrastructure, Australia National University, Monash University and University of Queensland, and has been supported by the Australian Government's Education Investment Funds through NeCTAR. Brisbane | Australia 20–25 Oct | 2013 7th eResearch Australasia Conference