We report on the architecture and design choices of the EarthCARE (EC) processing facility and a parallel testbed facility supporting scientific processors development, testing and integration. The EC mission is concerned with measuring factors relevant to the earth radiation balance. The satellite carries four scientific instruments. Various processors running at the processing facility transform the raw instruments telemetry (level 0 products) into geophysical parameters (level 2 products) including synergistic products that merge information from several instruments and processing chains. ESA has established an effective in-house standard which defines a generic processing interface that is adhered to by Payload Data Ground Segments (PDGS) of several Earth Observation missions. The generic interface provides declarative elements to decompose processors into lower level individual tasks and integrate such processors in a processing and resource management layer by configuration only. In view of the large number of processors and resulting products to be handled by the EC mission at the processing facility a new configuration element has been introduced that amends the processor interface with a configuration language for the specification of complete workflows (DAGs). This workflow configuration language is domain specific and allows expressing PDGS processing workflows in a very concise way in terms of input output relations and processing resource needs. In line with the principles of the Earth Explorer concept that is focussing on innovative missions, the EC mission infrastructure also includes a processor testbed facility in order to streamline the testing and integration of algorithms under development into an infrastructure that is close to the operational processing facility in terms of processor interfaces and data and downstream data treatment. The testbed facility profits from processing facility design choices like the use of a well-defined workflow def
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