NASA Earth Exchange: A Collaborative Supercomputing Platform

Overview

The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) is a new collaboration platform that provides a mechanism for scientific collaboration and knowledge sharing for the Earth science community. NEX combines supercomputing resources, Earth system modeling and workflow management tools, and NASA remote sensing data feeds to deliver a complete work environment in which users can explore and analyze large datasets, run modeling codes, collaborate on new or existing projects, and quickly share results among NEX members.

Project Details

The main goal of the NEX project is to enable enhanced and more efficient use of data obtained from observations recorded using scientific instruments for NASA Earth science technology, research, and applications programs.

NEX utilizes the Pleiades supercomputer, together with over 1 petabyte of satellite, climate and model datasets, to accelerate research in the Earth sciences. Research results and project details can then be shared with the science community through the NEX portal—a web-based knowledge network. In addition, NEX capabilities include a state-of-the-art collaboration environment that enables distributed teams to work together and share knowledge with the rest of the community through seminars and other outreach activities.

Results and Impact

As the development of the NEX environment continues, we are striving to lower the barrier of entry to data- and compute-intensive research projects. NEX will provide a mechanism for continuous engagement among members of the global science communities to work together to address grand challenge problems in Earth sciences.

Role of High-End Computing Resources

The Pleiades supercomputer, combined with the massive data storage and high-speed networks, enables NEX to engage scientific communities and provide them with capabilities to execute modeling and data analysis on a large scale that was not previously achievable by most scientists. In one recent application of NEX, a research team from NASA and South Dakota State University used the system to derive a new global vegetation map from over 80,000 NASA Landsat scenes, at 30-meter resolution, in order to provide a dynamic view of changing vegetation over the course of the year. The processing of nearly 5 trillion pixels took only a few hours on Pleiades, providing an unprecedented monitoring capability at a global scale.