Leveraging User Access Patterns and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Accelerate Data Delivery from Shared-use Scientific Observatories

Abstract: With the growing number and increasing availability of shared-use instruments and observatories, observational data is becoming an essential part of application workflows and contributor to scientific discoveries in a range of disciplines. However, the corresponding growth in the number of users accessing these facilities coupled with the expansion in the scale and variety of the data, is making it challenging for these facilities to ensure their data can be accessed, integrated, and analyzed in a timely manner, and is resulting significant demands on their cyberinfrastructure (CI). In this paper, we present the design of a push-based data delivery framework that leverages emerging in-network capabilities, along with data pre-fetching techniques based on a hybrid data management model. Specifically, we analyze data access traces for two large-scale observatories, Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and Geodetic Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience (GAGE), to identify typical user access patterns and to develop a model that can be used for data pre-fetching. Furthermore, we evaluate our data pre-fetching model and the proposed framework using a simulation of the Virtual Data Collaboratory (VDC) platform that provides in-network data staging and processing capabilities. The results demonstrate that the ability of the framework to significantly improve data delivery performance and reduce network traffic at the observatories' facilities.