A Cloud-Based Platform for Supporting Research Collaboration

This paper describes a cloud-based platform, called RP-SMARF, for supporting research collaboration in the area of smart facilities management. More precisely, the proposed system delivers sophisticated domain-specific services to users by linking together disparate privately-owned elements such as data repositories, specialized hardware resources and specialized software applications into a unified framework. This allows research collaborators within a knowledge domain to easily run complex applications developed by researchers within the domain on complex datasets. Both batch-type processing as well as interactive application access are supported by the platform. The processing of live data streams generated in one site by an application residing in another site can also be performed. An authorization framework allows element owners to precisely control which users can access various elements. RP-SMARF unifies geographically dispersed heterogeneous resources for research collaborators. This simplifies making software created by researchers more usable by other researchers thereby making many researchers more productive.