Kathleen Baynes

Preparing for the Onslaught: NASA Earth Sciences Big Data Future

Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Building 8 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Cookies at 10:30 AM)

The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) earthdata.nasa.gov is a major core capability within NASA's Earth Science Data Systems Program. EOSDIS ingests, processes, archives and distributes data from a large number of Earth observing satellites. EOSDIS consists of a set of processing facilities and Earth Science data centers distributed across the United States and serves hundreds of thousands of users around the world, providing hundreds of millions of data files each year covering many Earth Science disciplines.

As upcoming NASA Earth Science missions promise to provide unprecedented data volume, researchers demand increased requirements for compute elasticity and versatility, and government continues to feel the pressure to do more with less, NASA's EOSDIS has been exploring opportunities to leverage public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) to meet these demands. This talk focuses on describing EOSDIS, outlining its challenges, and explaining our multi-pronged approach to meet these challenges.

Kathleen Baynes is a Systems Architect for the Earth Science Data Information System (ESDIS) project, the management component of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). She has spent the past decade working on large-scale metadata cataloging systems, including the EOSDIS Common Metadata Repository search.earthdata.nasa.gov. She currently manages the Global Imagery Browse Services system worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov and oversees several cloud prototyping efforts for the ESDIS project. In addition to this work, she is active in the Earth Science metadata curation community and is passionate about the open source software movement, working to bring software and data to the people. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University. She lives with her husband and two kiddos in Fulton, Maryland.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Chris Lynnes

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040