Searchlight

Searchlight: Enabling Online Data Visualization at NSIDC

Marilyn Kaminski, Ruth Duerr, Siri Jodha Singh Khalsa, Mark Parsons

The Searchlight project is building a web-accessible system with a robust, extensible infrastructure to provide NSIDC’s users the ability to preview and analyze key data sets in our collection. We are leveraging our existing tools by building a data delivery infrastructure using a layered architecture that can also enable services for external systems or portals and expand the collections we can serve by making using of other databases and services. Our hardware capabilities have shifted dramatically in recent years from systems with long latency times to systems with real-time, reliable access to spinning disk. We will now have the capability to quickly provide more users with data that is more precisely fitted to their needs, and to let them work interactively with our most important data sets.