SeedMe: A cyberinfrastructure for sharing results

Computational simulations have become an indispensible tool in a wide variety of science and engineering investigations. Nearly all scientific computation and analyses create transient data and preliminary results, these may consist of text, binary files and visualization images. Quick and effective assessments of these data are necessary for efficient use of the computation resources, but this is complicated when a large collaborating team is geographically dispersed and/or some team members do not have direct access to the computation resource and output data. Current methods for sharing and assessing transient data and preliminary results are cumbersome, labor intensive, and largely unsupported by useful tools and procedures. Each research team is forced to create their own scripts and ad hoc procedures to push data from system to system, and user to user, and to make quick plots, images, and videos to guide the next step in their research. These custom efforts often rely on email, ftp, and scp, despite the ubiquity of much more flexible dynamic web-based technologies and the impressive display and interaction abilities of today's mobile devices. To fill this critical gap we have developed SeedMe (Swiftly Encode, Explore and Disseminate My Experiments), is a web-based architecture to enable the rapid sharing of content directly from applications running on High Performance Computing or cloud resources. SeedMe converts a slow, manual, serial, error prone, repetitive, and redundant sharing and assessment process into a streamlined automatic and web accessible cyberinfrastructure. We provide an easy to use sharing model with granular access control, and mobile device support. SeedMe provides secure input and output complementing HPC resources, without compromising their security model, and thereby expand and extend their capabilities. SeedMe aims to foster rapid assessment, iteration, communication, and dissemination of transient data and preliminary results by seeding content that can be accessed via a simple collaborative web interface.