DAWN: a Simulation Model for Evaluating Costs and Tradeoffs of Big Data Science Architectures

Data science is emerging as a critical area of research and technology to advance scientific discovery, knowledge, and decision-making through systematic computational approaches to analyzing massive data sets. The sheer volume of data increase, coupled with the highly distributed and heterogeneous nature of scientific data sets, is requiring new approaches to how the data will be ultimately managed and analyzed. This requires evaluating the scalability and distribution of complex software architectures. DAWN (Distributed Analytics, Workflows and Numeric) is a model for simulating the execution of data processing workflows on arbitrary data system architectures. DAWN was developed to provide NASA and the scientific community at large with an additional tool to prepare for the upcoming Big Data deluge in science.