Software Infrastructure to Enable Modeling & Simulation as a Service (M&SaaS)

This SBIR Phase 2 project will produce a software service infrastructure that enables most modeling and simulation (M&S) activities – from code development and compilation to runtime execution and collaboration – to be performed from a standard web browser across cloud- and grid-enabled computing resources. By addressing the security, scalability and virtualization challenges that have heretofore prevented service-centric M&S from being practical, this first-of-its-kind Modeling and Simulation as a Service (M&SaaS) platform will allow M&S users and developers alike to avoid many of the obstacles that currently confound the delivery, accessibility and usability of traditional, non-service-oriented M&S software. Building upon its commercial Grid Software as a Service (GSaaS) platform, Parabon convincingly demonstrated M&SaaS feasibility in Phase 1, as well as its ability to deliver the M&SaaS solution, completing in Phase 1 a Phase 2 solicitation goal of executing a NASA climate model across a computational grid and displaying the results, all from a browser. By the completion of Phase 2, M&SaaS will support, at TRL 6-7, browser-based source code editing, management of distributed repositories, research collaboration via forums and wikis, and virtualized build and runtime environments, all from within richly featured and access-controlled web accounts. M&SaaS has the potential to revolutionize how M&S is practiced across many industries – including defense, finance and pharmaceuticals – however, its benefit to NASA could be remarkable. Because the NASA mission often involves science that does not readily admit to direct experimentation, M&S is often the only means by which to answer significant scientific and engineering questions. The productivity improvements and cost reductions enabled via this new service paradigm will help NASA and other organizations generate discoveries more readily and realize significantly higher return on M&S investments.