Parabon Computation announced today its award of a NASA Small Business Innovative Research Grant (SBIR) to develop a grid portal and associated service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will allow models and simulations to be executed as services. The resulting, so-called Componentized Models as a Service (CMaaS) system will let users select from different modeling components (e.g., an oceanographic model and an atmospheric simulation), execute the combined model across an enterprise grid and view the results, all from a standard web browser.

NASA has computational models that perform a variety of numerical simulations and data analysis that represent significant value to the ongoing work of NASA scientists and engineers, as well as universities and other government institutions with whom NASA collaborates. Parabon will conduct a feasibility study and perform prototyping in this Phase I SBIR to demonstrate the viability of the CMaaS system. CMaaS will leverage Parabon’s revolutionary Frontier Grid Platform, which aggregates the computational capacity of existing IT resources and delivers it as a flexible and scalable utility.

Once deployed, the CMaaS infrastructure, a grid powered Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system, will ease the discovery and use of existing NASA models among researchers, encourage collaboration among software component developers and provide a homogenous publishing environment. The solution promises to improve the return on NASA’s modeling and simulation investments, the utilization of its computing resources and the ease-of-use of the resultant modeling applications.

“When we think of research excellence, NASA is certainly at the forefront,” stated Dr. Steven Armentrout, Parabon Founder and CEO. “Parabon is extremely well suited to help NASA realize its vision of a CMaaS environment that will accelerate and streamline its modeling and simulation capabilities for a new era of computational discovery. We look forward to putting the power of Parabon’s Frontier Grid Platform to work to bring together the best aspects of grid computing and SaaS to take high-performance modeling and simulation to the next level.”