VIRTUAL RESEARCH ENVIRONMENTS: ENABLING A STEP CHANGE IN GEOSCIENCE RESEARCH GLOBALLY

Very little research is undertaken today without some online interaction with compute, data, software or people. Virtual Research Environments (VRE’s) are increasingly created to harness the power of the Internet to support a more dynamic, online approach to collaborative working. VRE’s are very diverse and can range from individual researchers working on distributed data resources, to teams of highly skilled researchers accessing online fairly substantial High Performance Computing environments that facilitate in situ processing of large volumes of data using community codes developed through international co-operative efforts.

VRE’s are currently funded in Europe as Virtual Research Environments; in Australia as Virtual Laboratories and in the USA as Science Gateways. Elsewhere they have been called Co-laboratories, Virtual Observatories, Collaborative Interactive Environments and Analytics Platforms/Engines. All involve provide infrastructure that enable sharing of resources and common infrastructures over the Internet. Already initiatives such as the Research Data Alliance, Data One, World Data Service, etc have gone a long way towards standardizing data to enable online discovery and interoperability of distributed data resources. To advance VREs further, more effort needs to be put into standardisation of the interfaces that enable distributed systems to be loosely coupled and interact in real time, leading to the vision of applications accessing data from many locations and across multiple domains. Such an infrastructure would have a valuable role to play in Hazards Research and other geoscience domains particularly those that require rapid response times.

VRE’s are also important in areas where the cost of compute infrastructures to support research is becoming prohibitive (eg, third world countries): in particular for software. Although software is increasingly available as open source, there is still too much duplication of effort in a plethora of independently developed software tools, which face challenges in costs of maintenance and trust. The step change in research practices will be towards accessing high quality software codes that are built as community codes as part of international co-operative efforts that are then made accessible as services through VREs.