Bring the Geophysical Data Onto a High Performance Data Node
Jingbo B. Wang, Ben Richard Evans, Irina Bastrakova, Carina Kemp, Ryan Fraser, Lesley Wyborn · 2015
Abstract The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University (ANU) has organised a priority set of 30+ large volume national earth and environmental data assets on a High Performance Data (HPD) node within a High Performance Computing (HPC) facility, as a special node under the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Research Data Storage Infrastructure (RDSI) project. The Australian National Geophysical Collection was identified as a nationally significant collection and approved as one of the RDSI funded collections. It includes the most comprehensive publicly available collections of Australian airborne magnetic, gamma-ray, seismic, electromagnetic, magnetotelluric and gravity data sets. The total size allocated for this geophysical data collection is currently 300Terabytes. Organising this major geophysical data collection within a high performance computing environment creates a new capacity for accessing and processing data at both high resolution, and at full continent spatial extent. Further by co-locating and harmonising the geophysical data assets with other significant national digital data collections (e.g., earth observation, geodesy, digital elevation, bathymetry) new opportunities have arisen for Data-Intensive interdisciplinary science at a scale and resolution not hitherto possible. To support this integrated HPC/HPD infrastructure our data management practices include co-development of Data Management Plans (DMP) with the data collection custodians; the development of standards compliant catalogues on data collections/data sets; and minting and maintaining persistent identifiers. The data are accessible either via direct access or via international standards compliant data services including geospatial standard (ISO 19115) catalogues, metadata harvesting protocols (OAI-PMH) and OGC protocols. A Virtual Geophysics Laboratory has also been established that links the geophysical data assets with online software and tools using cloud based scientific workflows.