A scientific collaboration cloud platform and its multidisciplinary applications

This paper presents the Duckling platform, which is a scientific collaboration cloud platform, and its multidisciplinary applications. The Duckling platform provides not only a series of core services such as Research Online, Data Harvest Tool, High-performance computing Access Tool and Mobile Collaboration Tool, but also an extensible mechanism for developing plug-ins to fulfill special requirements of different research areas. Based on the Duckling platform, multidisciplinary collaboration applications have been accomplished in geography, microbiology and astronomy. Supported by the Duckling cloud platform, several key technologies in those application areas have been improved, such as land surface data assimilation, metagenomics data analysis and astronomical data processing from two-dimensional to one-dimensional spectroscopic images. To this day, hundreds of scientists have benefited from those cloud-based multidisciplinary applications.