NEON, Inc. is awarded a grant to finalize the cyberinfrastructure component of the final design for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). NEON is a continental research platform that will extend our understanding of the biosphere to regional and continental scales. NEON will be a ?shared-use? research platform of field deployed instrumented towers and sensor arrays, sentinel measurements, remote sensing capabilities, natural history archives, and facilities for data analysis, modeling, visualization, and forecasting, all networked onto a cyberinfrastructure backbone. Activities supported under this request are to (1) produce a detailed design as part of the requirements to establish readiness for construction of the NEON facility and (2) test and validate the design components with field implementations of sensors and cyberinfrastructure prototypes. The proposed work will define the parameters required to assure accurate and precise measurements with the goal of gaining a complete, clear, thorough and well-documented understanding of the science requirements as the foundation for developing a comprehensive description of the needs for the CI and operational support architectures. The project will seek to identify and address potential critical issues well before construction to minimize the costs in time and materials associated with any necessity of changing the design during or after the commencement of implementation or operations. The complexity of the relationships between data products, measurements, sensors, and the flow-down from Grand Challenge questions to research requirements will be documented with sophisticated analysis and a high degree of collaboration with NEON scientific staff, the CI team, operations staff as well as external scientific, engineering collaborators and equipment and software vendors.
The Completion of the NEON Cyber Infrastructure Construction Ready Design Project was charged with meeting the following objectives: Formulate a comprehensive cyber infrastructure architecture Develop a detailed construction ready design Finalize the detailed construction WBS Create a project plan for construction, implementation and operational phases In the 2 years and 5 months that the project was active, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) computing staff, which grew from 1 to 8 engineers and administrators, conducted numerous interviews and meetings with staff scientists in order to elicit and understand the requirements that would be imposed on the Cyber Infrastructure (CI). Based on careful analysis of these requirements, the computing staff developed a cyber infrastructure architecture that embodies the following key architectural principles of Extensibility, Manageability, and Reliability. These architectural principles were extracted from the scientific data collection and curation requirements based on the long temporal (30 yrs)and geographical (continental) extents within which the Cyber infrastructure is expected to function. The architecture that the NEON computing staff developed to achieve these "ilities" is a highly modular architecture whose components or subsystems interact indirectly via messages sent and delivered over an Enterprise Service Bus. Further, the architecture was resolved into a detailed component design that was implemented and thoroughly tested on a prototype, scaled down cyber infrastructure utilizing all Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware, and approximately 70% COTS and Open Source software. The architecture and design were technically reviewed in a number of design reviews, culminating in the NSF sponsored Final Design Review (FDR). The architecture was also documented in a cyber infrastructure architecture document. The computing staff also performed a bottom up analysis of the work required to construct a full blown cyber infrastructure and generated a detailed construction Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) which was integrated into the NEON Construction WBS and presented at and passed an NSF sponsored Final Design Review (FDR). In addition, the NEON computing staff created a complete set of project plans for the construction, implementation, and operation of the cyber infrastructures. These project plans included a Management Plan, a Software Development Plan, a Software Reuse Plan, a Security Plan, a Software Configuration Management Plan, and a Software Metrics Plan. The cyber infrastructure that has been designed and prototyped as a result of this Cooperative Agreement (CA) will, when fully implemented during construction, will be an integrating force not only for NEON but for the ecological community as whole. The CI will be the central collection, curation, and dissemination resource that promises to provide the community extensive, varied, and comprehensive data that can be used for transformational ecological forecasting capability. It will be an enabler and facilitator of transformative ecological science which promises to provide an early warning system for ecological impacts of climate change, invasive species, and emerging diseases. The cyber infrastructure will also be instrumental in facilitating the education of the next generation of scientists in the ecological and related fields.
