Marine Research Competence Centre

To understand the effects of global warming in marine environments, oceanographers analyse and interpret measurements of different physical and chemical parameters, such as temperature or salinity. These parameters are collected by large sea observation consortiums, such as Euro-Argo, for example. To improve their understanding of ocean circulation and climate machinery, oceanographers need to access original observations from diverse sources.

Challenge

The main data and computational challenges for marine research are to find a way to aggregate distributed data sources and to give researchers interactive access existing data and the necessary tools to analyse it. And because the scientific challenges are not going to be exhausted, to guarantee the sustainability of the services for the years to come.

The goals of the Marine Research Competence Centre are, therefore, to validate, integrate and operate services and components to create a fully supported, open data analytics platform where scientific users will be able to select, filter, aggregate, synthesize large volume of reference marine observations.

Workplan

In the context of the EOSC-hub project, the Marine Reasearch Competence Centre will develop the following components:

• Data Analytics Platform to support data storage and cluster computing abilities. Data will be staged in/out using the B2STAGE service. The computing resources will be configured to provide high performance while controlling the cluster usage. Jupyter notebook containers will be provided on-demand through the EGI Cloud Container service.
• GUI web application to enable users to configure data subsetting or automated subscription to visualize and stage the data from B2DROP (private datasets, results) or B2SAFE (public repositories) to and from the data analytic platform. The application with be developed on virtual machine image providing with tools needed to build a web service and deployed on the EGI Cloud Compute infrastructure.