Building Scientific Workflows for the Geosciences with Open Community Software

We describe the design and development of the Apache Airavata scientific workflow software and its application to problems in geosciences. Airavata is based on Service Oriented Architecture principles and is developed as general purpose software for managing large-scale science applications on supercomputing resources such as the NSF's XSEDE. Based on the NSF-funded EarthCube Workflow Working Group activities, we discuss the application of this software relative to specific requirements (such as data stream data processing, event triggering, dealing with large data sets, and advanced distributed execution patterns involved in data mining). We also consider the role of governance in EarthCube software development and present the development of Airavata software through the Apache Software Foundation's community development model. We discuss the potential impacts on software accountability and sustainability using this model.