EarthConsole®

EarthConsole® is a cloud-based platform providing a set of support services to assist researchers, innovators, and service providers in exploiting Earth Observation data to gain insights into our planet. EarthConsole® services respond to the needs of different EO data users’ communities. The community of researchers working on altimetry applications is extensively using customised EarthConsole® solutions available via the “Altimetry Virtual Lab”. This community will soon be followed by the one using Heritage Mission data, which will benefit from personalised services available in the Heritage Mission Virtual Lab. Users of any type of EO data can use the services described below or request specific service customisation responding to their scientific needs.

EarthConsole® offers:

• G-BOX (Integrated Development and Execution Environment): a cloud-based virtual machine (VM) for algorithm development, testing and post processing analysis, providing fast access to the dataset offered by the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services – DIAS to relieve the users from the costly remote download of data. The virtual machine comes with pre-installed packages and software supporting EO data exploitation to reduce the configuration burden on users: SNAP, QGIS, R, BRAT, and JupyterHub. In addition to these software, Panoply and Python are available on the altimetry virtual machines. With high-speed network connections, proper resource flexibility, powerful hardware resources from the cloud and many EO datasets available on-line, G-BOX provides EO data users with the needed resource flexibility to easily perform their own processing.
• P-PRO (Parallel Processing Service): a High Performing Computing Environment for running Earth Observation algorithms on large volumes of data and coming with a set of processors integrated and ready for use:
  • ALES+ SAR Retracker – developed by the Technical University of Munich,
  • FF-SAR (Fully Focused SAR) for CryoSat-2 – developed by Aresys srl,
  • SARINvatore for CS-2, SARvatore for CS-2, SARvatore for S3 – developed by the ESA-ESRIN Altimetry Team,
  • TUDaBO SAR-RDSAR – developed by the University of Bonn,
  • Fully-Focused SAR for Sentinel-3 – Aresys Srl,
  • SAMPy - developed within the ESA Cryo-TEMPO project ,
  • SNAC - SNAP S-1 GRD Amplitude Change

All processors can be requested for both bulk (P-PRO service) or on-demand (see below P-PRO ON DEMAND service) processing.

With the parallelization of the computation, the flexibility of the amount of cloud resources, the local access to EO data and the delegated management of the processing campaign, P-PRO provides users with the necessary features to speed up their research work.

• P-PRO ON DEMAND (Parallel Processing On Demand): it is a flexible platform where users can easily handle their processing tasks and independently manage all related activities. Thanks to a user-friendly interface, users can easily go from the creation of a new task passing by an overview on tasks status, to the download of results on their own.
• I-APP (Application Integration Service): it is a service to receive expert support for the integration of EO algorithms into the P-PRO infrastructure for enabling bulk (P-PRO service) or on-demand processing (P-PRO ON DEMAND). Given the flexibility of the P-PRO and P-PRO ON DEMAND infrastructure, through the I-APP service users can request to integrate in principle any processor, also coming from other platforms.