ApacheCon NA 2010 Session

Leveraging Open Source Technologies to Enable Scientific Discovery

Scientific discovery is largely a collaborative endeavor. From the design and execution of a robotic mission to explore the solar system to the evaluation of biomarkers that identify a particular predisposition to cancer, the scientific community depends on multi-institutional collaboration as a key component of the discovery process. Science data systems play a key role in enabling the collaborative model in scientific discovery and must apply many of the same principles that involve scientific collaboration to software development and deployment. Rather than being built in isolation, they must be developed in a collaborative model to ensure they can be run in multi-center deployments and support the varying and evolving needs of the scientific community. Open source software plays a vital role in enabling this process. From its vary nature, open source allows software development to turn scientific data system projects into multi-institutional and international systems by developing the communities around software product lines.

This talk will provide a background on scientific projects in planetary science, earth science and cancer research and the use of open source to enabling scientific data systems.