PALMS: A Modern Coevolution of Community and Computing Using Policy Driven Development

In 2007, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the Physical Activity and Location Measurement System (PALMS) project at the University of California, San Diego. Its mission is to advance exposure biology research by developing new methods of physical activity data capture and analysis from a geospatial perspective. A key early insight was that while exposure biology investigators often employ their own data analysis frameworks, many frameworks are conceptually similar. Forming a community based on common requirements and research directions, and serving that community with a common computing framework would, itself, be a major contribution to the NIH mission. This paper describes the PALMS Cyber infrastructure (CI), which comprises both the PALMS computing services and the exposure biology community it serves. By leveraging state of the art software architecture techniques, the PALMS CI is well positioned to serve the co evolution of a thriving research community and the computing systems that support it.