Title: The Collaborative Workbench (CWB) to Accelerate Science Algorithm Development
Presenting Author: Manil Maskey
Organization: University of Alabama, Huntsville

Abstract:
Collaboration is becoming essential in Earth science research. Science data, algorithms, and analysis results are scattered at different locations, and usually confined to researcher's laboratory. Versioning of such science artifacts requires complex structures. Handful scientific collaboration platforms that offer sharing require scientists to learn new tools. There is high cost and big learning curve associated with these tools. To address these issues, Earth science Collaborative Workbench (CWB) is being developed. CWB provides an extensible framework that can be customized easily. CWB doesn't require scientists to understand the technical details of the networking software involved. Instead, CWB enhances scientist's existing research environment by extending the tools that they are already familiar with, via plugins. Earth science analysis tools such as IDL and Python have already been integrated CWB. CWB uses cloud to scale the collaboration. Cloud provides a common repository both private and shared to store science artifacts as well as computational capabilities for reproducing science experiments. CWB provides collaboration capabilities directly but transparently within scientist's existing research tools. Versioning is also achieved transparently using Git. Cloud integration from CWB is seamless. Additionally, CWB also interfaces with a cloud-based middleware that includes a catalog that tracks and mediates the collaboration. CWB has been demonstrated to perform collaborative research by sharing not only the science experiments with code and data but also the experiment execution environment. Such sharing modality using cloud virtual machine has allowed for reproducing science experiment results without much effort.