Discovery Environment

iPlant Discovery Environments

The iPlant Collaborative is creating a cyberinfrastructure (CI) for the plant sciences.  One key aspect of this CI is the Discovery Environment (DE), which provides a modern, common web interface and platform to expose the computing, data, and application resources made available to the community.  The Grand Challenge-focused Discovery Environments will provide access not only to tools built by the Collaborative, but to many community-contributed tools as well.

Discovery Environments are designed to facilitate data exploration and scientific discovery.  The component model and framework will enable both fixed and user-configurable workflows.  Support for high performance computing will provide both seamless, behind-the-scenes computing resources on TeraGrid and other large systems for some applications, and more fine-grained control through command-line tools for advanced users.  Provenance tracking of both primary and derived files will make experiment tracking and reproducibility possible. Collaboration tools will enable users to share data, workflows, analysis results, and data visualizations. iPlant's cyberinfrastructure provides a platform to serve as the basis for all future development and its application programming interfaces will allow the community to integrate tools into Discovery Environments.