SeedMe: A scientific data sharing and collaboration platform.

Rapid secure data sharing and private online discussion are requirements for coordinating today's distributed science teams using High Performance Computing (HPC), visualization, and complex workflows. Modern HPC infrastructures enable fast computation, but the data produced remains within a site's storage and network environment tuned for performance rather than broad easy access. To share data and visualizations among distributed collaborators, manual efforts are required to move data out of HPC environments, stage it locally, bundle it with metadata and descriptions, manage versions, encode videos from visualization animations, and finally post it all online somewhere for secure access and discussion among project colleagues. While some of these tasks can be scripted, the effort remains cumbersome, time-consuming, and error prone. Thus, a more streamlined approach with a persistent infrastructure is needed. In this paper we describe SeedMe -- the Stream Encode Explore and Disseminate My Experiments platform for web-based scientific data sharing and discussion. SeedMe provides streamlined data movement from HPC and desktop environments, metadata management, data descriptions, video encoding, secure data sharing, threaded discussion, and, optionally, public access for education, outreach, and training.