Software Spotlight: The NDS Labs Workbench

NCSA develops and/or contributes to quite a bit of software across its various groups. The newly formed Scientific Software and Applications (SSA) division attempts to bring these endeavors together, both leveraging and building off of the work and experience across NCSA’s supported software efforts. In this Software Spotlight we will highlight the NDS Labs Workbench, one of our newer software activities that aims at making it easier to try out and work against the vast landscape of data management tools that exist within the scientific community. Developed out of the National Data Service Consortium the Workbench is both a platform and service developed to facilitate discovery, exploration, development, interoperability, and sharing amongst an extensible suite of data management and analysis tools. To date the Workbench has been effectively used to share and discover a wide variety of research data-related tools and to provide scalable cloud-based training environments for workshops focused on research data management and analysis. In this spotlight we will describe and demonstrate this “App Store” for scientific data tools.