Scott Sellars (University of California San Diego), John Graham (University of California San Diego), Dmitry Mishin (University of California San Diego), Kyle Marcus (University of California San Diego), Ilkay Altintas (University of California San Diego), Thomas DeFanti (University of California San Diego), Larry Smarr (University of California San Diego), Camille Crittenden (University of California, Berkeley), Frank Wuerthwein (University of California San Diego), Joulien Tatar (University of California Irvine), Phu Nguyen (University of California Irvine), Eric Shearer (University of California Irvine), Soroosh Sorooshian (University of California Irvine), and F. Martin Ralph (Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes)
In 2016, a team of earth scientists directly engaged a team of computer scientists to identify cyberinfrastructure (CI) approaches that would speed up an earth science workflow. This paper describes the evolution of that workflow as the two teams bridged CI and an image segmentation algorithm to do large scale earth science research. The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) and The Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI) resources were used to significantly decreased the earth science workflow's wall-clock time from 19.5 days to 53 minutes. The improvement in wall-clock time comes from the use of network appliances, improved image segmentation, deployment of a containerized workflow, and the increase in CI experience and training for the earth scientists. This paper presents a description of the evolving innovations used to improve the workflow, bottlenecks identified within each workflow version, and improvements made within each version of the workflow, over a three-year time period.
