Charlotte: Scientific Modeling and Simulation Under the Software as a Service Paradigm

NASA spends considerable effort supporting the efforts of collaborating researchers. These researchers are interested in interacting with scientific models provided by NASA and they are located throughout the world. The process of distributing legacy research codes to this disparate group of researches and assisting them with the compilation of these codes is time consuming and there for costly. The proposed innovation would allow users to interact with these models using a modern, familiar web-based application interface. Functionality such as the editing of input conditions, interaction with supercomputing queues, monitoring of code progress, and accessing of results would all be provided through web services. The web application would interact with these web services based on user input from a variety of controls. The architecture is based on the paradigm of Software as a Service and similar to technologies underlying state of the art web applications such as Google Maps. As such it represents a huge advancement from the traditional approach of distributing legacy codes and dealing with compilation issues with varying hardware and operating systems.