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Tools: iPlant Discovery Environment and Services
The iPlant Collaborative creates a cyberinfrastructure (CI) for the plant sciences. One key unit of this CI is a Discovery Environment (DE), which provides a common web interface to allow researchers to access computing applications and data. The Grand Challenge-focused Discovery Environment provides access not only to tools built by the iPlant Collaborative, but to many community-contributed tools as well.
iPlant's hardware and software infrastructure supports the needs of the Discovery Environment and the Grand Challenge teams. iPlant provides world-class tools and services including high performance computing, data analysis, mining and visualization, workflow and educational tools. We also develop applications to support remote collaborations and virtual organizations. The entire cyberinfrastructure is driven by the requirements and needs of the Grand Challenge teams and the plant biology community; it is designed for sustainability, security, and interoperability.
Key to iPlant's CI vision is to actively engage the external community (academic, government, industry) in new opportunities. The ultimate goal is to provide the plant biology community with a proactive Discovery Environment that enables scientific research and computational thinking. The CI is an adaptable community-extensible framework that furnishes:
- Data Management:Importing data into the iPlant Cyberinfrastructure.
- Tool and Workflow Access: Access tools and workflows in and through the CI.
- Tool Integration:Add tools to extend the functionality of the CI.
- Workflow Creation: Ccreate new analysis flows by linking tools in the CI.