Accelerating NASA Cryosphere and ICESat-2 science with collaborative cloud computing

Funding Program: NASA Transform to Open Science and NASA ICESat-2 Project Science Office
Start Date: 1 October 2022
End Date: 30 September 2024
Collaborating Institutions: University of Berkeley, 2i2c, University of Washington, University of New Hampshire

Science is not composed of isolated groups of practitioners, but is rather an interconnected network of communities of practice, with members that fluidly move between them. Infrastructure for scientific research and collaboration should lean into this structure and find ways to leverage it to make science more productive and inclusive. NASA (along with many other scientific entities) has started to adopt practices consistent with this natural structure of contemporary science. Communities such as Project Jupyter and Pangeo have started to create a model for the inclusive, interconnected, and data-intensive practices of the future through cloud-based JupyterHub workflows. However, substantial barriers exist for individual users to make the transition from their local systems to the cloud to accomplish research goals: cloud cost opacity, deployment complexity, and a general lack of community awareness and knowledge, among others. We can overcome these barriers by building upon the existing cloud-workflow model and creating infrastructure that allows researchers to fluidly move their workflows wherever they can do their best work.

We have two projects, led by postdoctoral scholar Dr. Tasha Snow and visiting PhD student Joanna Millstein, to establish a curated interactive computing platform and develop community expertise in using these platforms with the NASA ICESat-2 Science Team and the larger NASA Cryospheric Science Community during the NASA Year of Open Science in 2023. Specifically, we will (1) provide cloud and community expert-led training workshops at multiple community venues (including ICESat-2 Science Team meetings, the Future of Greenland ice Sheet Science (FOGSS) Workshop, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop, and the American Geophysical Unioin Fall Meeting), and (2) build new open-source tools that facilitate the growth of multi-community infrastructure. To accomplish these goals, we will partner with the International Interactive Computing Collaboration (2i2c) team, who will operate and develop the cloud-infrastructure - to manage and operate community-specific infrastructure, developing and improving the open source tools behind it, and guiding these communities in their use of these tools.