Fully Integrating Data with Compute Workflows: A Platform to Better Serve Scientific Research

The NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure has recognized the emerging and evolving need for platforms that fully integrate data and computing workflows, and is calling for research to deliver systems that provide a full spectrum of data services and also offer a coherent coupling with computing software. The Digital Environment to Enable Data-driven Science (DEEDS) project has created a cross-domain, self-serve platform for data and computing that supports the entire end-to-end research investigation process. DEEDS offers interactive interfaces to 1) collect, manage, and explore data, 2) define and launch tools, 3) track computational workflows, and 4) access toolkits for ad hoc analytics. All interfaces are available from a single dashboard so that the workflow between data and tools is smooth and intuitive. In this paper, we describe DEEDS innovations for handling data and computational workflows, and we present the use cases from four science domains that defined features, services, and usability requirements for DEEDS.