Harness is a generic environment designed to handle easy loading, parsing, and evaluation of complex software projects and project groups. Large-scale systems consisting of multiple languages and intricate computational routines can be loaded into Harness as components and parsed into internal and external functions that can in turn be combined into workflows to be evaluated both in execution metrics and workflow state. Evaluations with matching output types can be compared against each other for differences as projects evolve over time. Harness uses a generic style that exposes system components as web enabled microservices, making it a good candidate for modernizing and standardizing all sorts of code bases. Harness was developed in concert with a reengineering effort of the pairwise homogeneity algorithm at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina, and is a perfect match for the complex climate data domain. This will be a general overview of the concept of the open source Harness software system, examining its tenets and potential utility in Big Climate Data. We plan on having the engineers who worked on the pairwise homogeneity algorithm reengineering available to discuss a real world application of the system. We are also hoping to hear feedback and features that would be most useful in future development, to see where the project should focus its development resources. For more information and a more detailed look, the white paper on the project is available.
