ESS Project Home Page Redesign

Objective This effort has two primary goals: to inform a diverse public about the purpose and achievements of the ESS Project and to facilitate the exchange and reuse of software produced by the ESS Science Team.

Approach: The previous World Wide Web (WWW) pages were reorganized to provide a top-level view of the ESS Project as a whole and revised to be more attractive and accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Accomplishments:

• The equivalent of approximately 70 printed pages were posted, most of them entirely new. Many hyperlinks were added to show the relationship of Project components to each other and the wider high-performance computing community.
• A major aspect of the work was enlivening the pages with graphics. Interlacing and transparent effects were employed for ease of use and improved appearance.
• Entries for the Principal and Guest Computational Investigators now include hyperlinks to their own WWW sites and software they submitted to the ESS Project Software Exchange.
• The WWW site served as the primary means for distributing the Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN) for Grand Challenge applications and enabling scalable computing testbed(s). Nearly 660 people downloaded the CAN files. GSFC saved over $92,000 in postage and printing by sending postcards announcing WWW availability.
• The Software Exchange currently has contributions from six Principal Investigators and five Guest Computational Investigators. In addition, a variety of codes from the Goddard Space Flight Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory Inhouse Computational Scientists are available. Downloads increased dramatically in FY95, with 638 users from 36 countries retrieving over 2,300 code packages. There is no accounting for the software downloads from the linked Investigator sites.
• The new pages were "advertised" in various WWW-resident lists and search sites.

Significance: The WWW has become the most popular service on the Internet and is a cost-effective way of delivering a message to potentially millions of people.

Status/Plans: The redesigned ESS Project Home Page was first available on 5/15/95. We have made and will continue to make continuous revisions and additions of new hyperlinks and pages as the need arises. A reorganization will occur in FY96 with the beginning of the Science Team II period.

Point of Contact:

Jarrett Cohen
Goddard Space Flight Center
jarrett.cohen@gsfc.nasa.gov
301-286-2744