Biodiversity
Understanding adaption in extreme environments
One of the ongoing activities of the PRAGMA is fostering virtual biodiversity expeditions by bringing domain scientists and cyberinfrastructure specialists together as a team. Over the past few years, PRAGMA members have been collaborating on virtualizing the Lifemapper software infrastructure. Virtualization and cloud computing have increased scalability, flexibility, efficiency and simplified application deployment on the PRAGMA cloud.
Lifemapper is a complex biological software infrastructure developed by the Biodiversity Institute at The University of Kansas. It creates and maintains an archive of species distribution maps calculated from public specimen distribution maps calculated from public specimen data and includes a suite of data and tools for biodiversity researchers that calculate single and multi-species distribution predictions and macroecological analyses.
Technical Goals:
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Create a viable virtualization solution that can be easily adopted and reused by scientists at multiple institutions and projects. This solution:
- allows fast deployment of ready-made cluster images;
- reproduces the complete Lifemapper processing pipeline at different sites and hosting environments;
- enables scientists to perform Lifemapper-facilitated data processing on large, sensitive or restricted data.
Additional Goals:
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To create a viable virtualization solution that can be easily adopted and reused by scientists at other institutions and projects.
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Garner uses (institutional and individual) to use these tools to create and work with their own specialized Lifemapper instance.