Online Scientific Collaboration Software

Ian Gorton, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the US Dept. of Energy, will speak on "Towards a Collaborative Scientific Knowledge Management Platform with Velo" at the Australian National University in Canberra, 11:30am, 10 July 2012. The software has been used for modelling carbon sequestration and climate change:

ANU College of Engineering & Computer Science

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING SEMINAR

Towards a Collaborative Scientific Knowledge Management Platform with Velo

Ian Gorton (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, US Dept. of Energy)

DATE: 2012-07-10
TIME: 11:30:00 - 12:30:00
LOCATION: Engineering Lecture Theatre (Building 32)

ABSTRACT:
Facilitating transformative improvements in the collaborative practices of the scientific community and their ability to share, manage and analyze massive data sets represents a software engineering challenge of immense magnitude. State-of-the-art collaborative platforms are examples of discipline-specific, stovepiped solutions, which have extremely limited utility for other science communities. Given the immense costs of building and maintaining such customized solutions, continuing down this path is unsustainable given the need to build even more sophisticated collaborative systems and accomplish wider scale deployment. Achieving a quantum leap in the utility of collaborative platforms to meet future requirements necessitates new approaches to designing and constructing their underlying software foundations.

This talk will describe our Velo software platform, which is designed to meet these future scientific collaboration requirements. Velo is designed to be highly customizable and scalable to meet a broad range of software requirements. Veloas architecture will be described, and the mechanisms adopted to address various quality requirements will be presented through examples from existing Velo deployments.

BIO:

I'm a Laboratory Fellow in Computational Sciences and Math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I manage the Data Intensive Scientific Computing group, and was the Chief Architect for PNNLas Data Intensive Computing Initiative. I'm also Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society. Until July 2006, I led the software architecture R&D at National ICT Australia (NICTA) in Sydney, Australia. My passion is analyzing and designing complex, high performance distributed systems, and embodying useful design and architecture knowledge in methods and tools that can be exploited by architects in other projects.