Welcome

Artists conception of the Earth's magnetosphere

CESWP (pronounced cess-wep) stands for “Cloud-Enabled Space Weather modeling and data assimilation Platform.”  The CESWP project has two goals:  to extend the Space Science Data Portal into the cloud and simplify access to space weather simulation tools.  Doing so will make it easy for space scientists to collaborate and run simulations and models on space weather data.

The simulations that scientists want to run can be extremely computationally expensive.  They often lend themselves to parallel processing and in some cases they can be distributed across many machines.  CESWP will encapsulate the scientists’ tools in virtual machines and move them to a computing cloud, insulating scientists from the details of where (and on what machines) the simulations are running.  CESWP will provide an interface that makes it easy for scientists anywhere in the world to initiate common space weather simulations and then run them in the cloud.  That means more time for the scientists to do their work and less time spent worrying about getting access to hardware and figuring out how to use it.

Space weather is the solar winds that buffet the Earth’s magnetosphere, for example (see diagram).  The most visible effect of space weather is the phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis (i.e. the Northern Lights), which is an interaction between the Earth’s magnetic field and solar wind.

We’ll know we’re successful when CESWP has achieved broad acceptance and use by the Space Science community.

Here’s a link to a mind map that will give you a bit more of an idea of what the project is all about: CESWP Mind Map.