CBL-GGEPS_As-Is_and_Aspirational_Endstate.pdf

UNCLASSIFIED

PE1 - GGEPS Workflow & Content

1. End State Visual Graphic

(U) The evolved GGEPS environment is envisioned to be the following:

(U) The assignment of UT:ARL as the GUI maintainer is the current arrangement. While it is possible in principle that this could be changed, the limiting factor is expertise. This subject area is not widely represented in academia nor in commercial industry. It would be difficult to locate a comparably competent alternative for this niche, highly technical scientific research area. Maintaining UT:ARL as the provider has the added benefit of allowing NGA to sustain the program at a key academic partner that, absent this effort, could potentially be disbanded.

2. Lean Business Case

Epic Name: (U) GGEPS – Content &

Workflow Funnel Entry Date:

Epic Owner: Jim

Friederich

Epic Description: Value Proposition (what you’re building) The NSG ability to model and mathematically calculate gravitational and magnetic field effects across the earth. This information is used for a wide array of navigational, scientific and military support purposes to

DoD, IC, USG Civil, Commercial and Foreign Government customers.

(U) For NSG analysts

(U) Who model and mathematically calculate geodesy, geoscience and magnetic field effects across the earth

(U) Our implementation

(U) Is a geodesy, geoscience and magnetic content solution and workflow management process

(U) That dramatically improves the content and production layers of gravity and magnetic models

(U) Unlike the current manual and inefficient model execution process

(U) Our Solution provides rapid development and execution of geodesy, geoscience and magnetic models for the navigational, scientific, and military support uses by DoD, IC, USG

Civil, Commercial, and Foreign Partner customers.

Business Outcome Hypothesis: (U) Obtain geodesy content to produce gravitational and magnetic models and data sets for select earth locations that are of the highest precision and produced in a timely manner.

Leading Indicators: production cycle reduced to 1 year

In Scope: (U) see scope box below Out of Scope: (U) None

Nonfunctional Requirements: (U) OCI-cleared staff to support the PMO, CIO-T IPO and organization staff for Enterprise Requirements, Architecture, Budget, Contracting /

Acquisition, and Legal support. Enterprise / Common Services for Identity Management &

Authentication, Search & Discovery, System Administration / O&S Support, Cloud

Infrastructure Provider, Enterprise Management / Help Desk·

Minimum Viable Product (MVPf) Functions

IPFGEOINT-6169 - (U) SE1.PE1 GGEPS Content & Workflow Closed

Key Summary Description

Date

Planned

Start

Date

Planned

Finish

Linked

Issues

IPFGEOINT-6168

(U) SE1.PE1

MVPf 2:

Content from

Partners

Multi-sourced geodesy, geoscience and magnetic content from international and academic partners.

Sep 30, Sep 29, IPFGEOINT-

IPFGEOINT-6167

(U) SE1.PE1

MVPf 1:

Cloud

Workflows

Cloud-based automated workflows

Sep 30, Sep 29, IPFGEOINT-

2 issues

(U) NOTE: This epic is non-severable with the other GGEPS epics.

Sponsors: (U) NGA/Source is the Mission Owner for NGA.

Users and Markets Affected: Beneficiaries (U) All NGA gravitational and magnetic product customers

Impact on Products, Programs and Services/ Buy-In

• (U) Requires integration of multiple data sets, inputs / requests from users and sensor inputs and historical information across NGA content programs: GNSS, GSS, and the worldwide

Geodetic Modeling scientific community,

• (U) Driven by customer’s mission needs, in particular DoD customers.

Impact on Sales, Distribution, Deployment/ Deployment

Analysis Summary:

(U) Analyzed the requirements and directives from customers.

Analyzed numerous development team and PMO studies and analyses for the solution recommendations.

Go / No-Go:

(U) Go https://usms.nga.mil/jira/browse/IPOF-6169?src=confmacro

Estimated Story Points (MVP)/Man Months

(U) Comparable to current Bana contract, with a velocity of 1 scrum team, 5-man, with a 12-sprint annual cycle. Limiting factor is availability of government support, so velocity will not sustain a greater than 1 scrum team effort without significant increase in government SME manning.(NOTE: This is the COMBINED velocity for ALL of GGEPS for ALL program epics)

Estimated Monetary Cost (MVP):

(U) See CAPE Cost Estimate

Type of Return:

(U) Supports highest priority DoD customers for critical mission applications. Current solutions are lacking in responsiveness due to excessive processing timelines. Achieving this epic will generate immediate savings in manpower and processing expenses due to greater runtime stability and faster time-to-evaluation. Will significantly reduce system failures due to timeouts, power disruptions, runtime errors, and other hardware and infrastructure-related issues that occur during multi-week processing threads.

Anticipated Business impact Mission

Achievement:

(U) Numerous mission customers of the highest national priority will have their information needs met in a significantly more timely manner.

In-house or Outsourced Development: (Adapt, Adopt, Buy, Build)

(U) Combination of In-House and Outsourced Development. The worldwide Geodetic scientific community provides significant subject matter expertise for algorithm and core science development. NGA/SF provides the subject matter expertise to translate the general science into NGA-specific algorithms, models and techniques that could provide the capability.

NGA/SF also produces the FG Tools specifications to implement the algorithms and models.

Estimated Development Timeline

(U) See the program plan below

Start Date:

(U) 1 Oct 2022

Completion date:

(U) 30 Sep 2024

Incremental Implementation Strategy:

(U) Historically, the program was largely dependent upon a combination of government programmers producing GOTS, and select contract support – typically university and government lab team. This epic plans to migrate to an Agile based approach that extends the initial work being done under a code modernization contract, to expand the best code curation practices across all GGEPS-related software. The current modernization contract uses Agile

Development to incrementally deliver capabilities. There is currently 1 development teams modernizing a large block of GGEPS legacy code that is mostly GOTS. More automated integration with select third party PMOs will be – in particular, a more streamlined integration with GSS content and potentially with unclassified Geodetic scientific community-provided content..

Sequencing and Dependencies + Key Partners:

(U) The legacy GGEPS solution was largely independent of any other entities, but also was a numerically and computationally intensive effort that was fragile during runtime. The improved solution is planned to leverage content and services from international and academic partners to improve internal processes. Additionally, automation will eliminate runtime fragility. Depends on the other GGEPS epics to succeed.

Milestones or Checkpoints:

(U) The program goes through established NGA/IPO Program Management Reviews (PMRs).

The current code modernization contract (which is the template for going forward) uses Agile methods with regular sprint reviews and backlog grooming events tied to the release train.

Attachments:

(U) See attachments as relevant.

Other Notes and Comments:

(Any additional miscellaneous Information)

Scope

Labor

Category Domain Service Configuration summary

Software

Development

Team

UC2S,

SC2S

Software and service development

1-2 Scrum Team capacity: Address SOC

Program Development Plan initiatives, and continue development and enhancement of current core capabilities: create and modernize code, workflow development, GUI development, software repoository curation, scripting / automation, programming language migration (potential task). Capacity is limited by government ability to V&V code output -- capacity cannot be significantlyincreased as SF cannot sustain significantly higher delivery velocities.

Software

Development

Team

UC2S,

SC2S

Specialty

Application Adaptive

Maintenance

GEOHIP, GEOPAK, EPS and associated application development

Software

Development

Team

UC2S,

SC2S

Data conditioning, usability, application integration to

Amazon cloud environment, and cloud functionality adaptation

Cloud City / ODS support for tailored data conditioning, data ingest, storage, content curation, and metadata tagging services

3. Roadmap

(U) The GGEPS project’s near-term development roadmap is shown. The tasks in the World

Building track are to develop the management of the content and workflows for the FG Tools items. The desired endstate, primarily in the To Be (2) phase, but to a degree in the To Be (1) phase also, is to harmonize the data storage layer with the NGA’s Open Data Store (ODS) content account, curation and management process. Whether the databases and files are literally place within the ODS environment, or are just structured such that they are compatible and accessible by the same, is a design tradeoff for the team to evaluate. Storage solution options will be explored, such as using S3 vice database, using an Amazon RDS hosted service database, or near-line Amazon EBS storage, or combinations thereof.

(U) For GGEPS, there are also various cloud-based options for workflow management to streamline the application executions. The team will also explore using CloudFormation to control VM instantiation, Lambda to run management scripts / recipes that chain the more intensive processing tasks together, and CloudWatch + messaging to monitor runtime execution status so that overall production can be more significantly automated and reliability increased.

The goal of this, among other things, is to address the FG SOC RPM 2.11b.

3.1. SOC RPM 2.11b -- Earth Gravitational Model

(U) Overview: The Earth Gravitational Model (EGM) is a component of the World Geodetic

Systems 1984. The EGM is a fully developed unclassified product that represents the gravitational potential of the earth. It is produced on a historical cycle of 12 years. It consists of a disturbing potential spherical harmonic equation and a set of spherical harmonic coefficients that are used to calculate global gravimetric quantities such as gravity anomalies and deflections of the vertical. The EGM is also used for satellite perturbation orbit predictions. However, the most ubiquitous use and important value for the NSG are determination of the geoid and geoid heights used for global mean sea level. The unclassified EGM is used internally by SFN as a basis input to other classified NGA gravity models that support DOD inertial navigation systems.

(U) Data Types: To build an EGM, NGA needs to collect global gravity data and associated data from a variety of platforms and instrumentation. This includes gravity and altimetry satellites, airborne and marine dynamic gravity meters, terrestrial meters, and absolute meters.

Supporting data includes global elevation and density information. Nearly all of this data is collected by external geophysical agencies, institutes, and companies, foreign and domestic, and is considered unclassified. NGA maintains a cadre of gravity meter assets for a Meter Loan

Program to geophysical entities in exchange for unrestricted use of the collect data.

(U) NGA Processing: After receipt of this unclassified gravity data, NGA performs evaluation and accuracy assessments using computer tools developed by University of Texas: Applied

Research Laboratories (UT:ARL) on our SECNET level computer systems, the GGEPS (thick client workstations, 40 compute servers[CPU and more importantly RAM], 4 application servers, FTP and databases servers, and file share storage). The assessed data is stored in a database.

The relevant gravity data are then retrieved and then further processed using NGA developed and maintained tools on the GGEPS to build various classified and unclassified gravity models, including the unclassified EGM, to support the NSG.

(U) Drivers/Restrictions: Although many SFN gravity products that support DOD and the NSG are produced annually, the EGM has been produced on a historic timetable of 12 years. Drivers

(or should one say restrictions) to this timetable include,

• contractor development of the model (this process is now in-house),

• mathematical techniques and modeling software development (many new techniques have been developed but some have not been implemented by NGA),

• computer hardware development (one step of one EGM process takes 13 weeks this same step takes 2 hours at Blue Waters) ,

• and acquisition of sufficient amounts of new data and data models.

(U) Current process: is a 1 – 5 year long process to complete a model run to produce a new set of gravity and geophysical models to be used in PNT.

(U) Measures: The measure is to be able to complete the updated gravity model process consistently each year. This is excluding the external coordination required for community acceptance and formal release. The longest lead-time in this process is the calculations that have taken 13 weeks to process and has been shown to be executable in hours. The Benefit of these additional processing power improvements would enable more frequent updates and reduced error to the end user community for these gravity models.

The Threshold measure is to be able to complete an updated gravity model 1 time a year.

The Objective measure is to be able to complete an updated gravity model Near Real Time (as needed within a few weeks), at any given time.

(U) Identifying new Gaps: Two recent events, one positive and one negative, have identified a gap in NGA gravity processing capabilities. The positive event is a recent partnership with the unclassified University of Illinois Blue Waters supercomputer that points to a processing capacity not available inside NGA. The negative event is the COVID ‘work from home’ posture and our inability to access the SECNET classified GGEPS computer system. Both of these events point to a need/gap of a GGEPS like computer system on the unclassified NGA enterprise domain. Other Gaps/Risk have existed and are documented below.

(U) Gaps/Risks:

• Ensuring SFN Contract Data Dollars are available from year to year to support acquisition and purchase of gravity data in deficient areas to ensure ever more accurate

EGMs and other gravity models.

• Ensuring SFN and IPF Maintenance Dollars exist to support repair and maintenance of

NGA’s gravity equipment in the NGA Meter Loan Program.

• Ensuring SFN and IPF Acquisition Dollars exist to support acquisition and recap of NGA gravity meters as equipment fails, are irreparable, become obsolete, or new technology emerges.

• Ensuring IPF supplies ISP and ASP Dollars to support the GGEPS computer system hardware and software, UT:ARL ASP software development, and other ISP and ASP services as needed.

• Design, build, and implement a similar unclassified GGEPS environment on the NGA

SBU enterprise domain to support :

1. Unclassified data evaluation and accuracy assessments, enabling ‘work from home’

2. Improved and more efficient, data ingest, export, and exchange, contact and communication with external partners with unclassified data, processing, and model generation (eliminating the necessity of constant and repeated up/down cross domain transfers between NGA SECNET and ‘the outside world’)

3. Unclassified EGM and gravity model development and generation

GGEPS Program Development Plan

(U) The Scripting and GUI tasks are also part of the FG Tools epic.

Milestone FY Work Description

SOC

RPM

(U) Geodetic

Scripting &

Automation

(U)

FY22-

(U) Expand the scripting and automation work from the current Code Modernization Contract to cover all Geodetic code and applications. Specifically, conduct tradeoff analysis on using AWS-based options such as Lambda and

CloudFormation to automate the analytic workflow.

(U) Geodetic

GUI

(U)

FY22-

(U) Expand the GUI work from the current Code

Modernization Contract to cover all Geodetic applications and content under an integrated GUI / user-facing presence.

(U) Geodetic

Content ID

Account

(U)

FY22-

(U) Establish and operationalize a Geodetic content account in Open Data Store (ODS), to include establishing the relevant content curation, data owner / data custodian, access controls, and retention rules.

4. Stakeholders