Unidata Science Gateway: A Cloud-based Platform for Enabling Open and Reproducible Science

The atmospheric community in the U. S. has relied mostly on high performance computing facilities (e.g., NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing facility and XSEDE resources), local computing clusters, and departmental workstations to conduct their science. Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in the way IT services are developed, deployed, operated, and paid for, placing science communities in the middle of a major paradigm shift.

There is also broad consensus that as data volumes grow rapidly, it is important to reduce data movement and bring processing and computations to the data. We need to give scientists an ecosystem that includes data, tools, models, and modern workflows, all residing in a cloud-like environment. Instead of moving data to users, data providers need to facilitate bringing analysis, visualization and other applications and tools to data - so called data proximate workflows.

Unidata has been developing big-data infrastructure and data-driven scientific workflows using cloud computing technologies for accessing, analyzing, and visualizing geoscience data. Unidata has implemented the aforementioned services on the Unidata Science Gateway, hosted on the Jetstream cloud, a facility funded by the National Science Foundation.

Unidata has developed techniques that combine robust access to well-documented datasets with easy-to-use tools, using workflow technologies such as JupyterHub and Docker Containers. In addition to fostering the adoption of technologies like pre-configured virtual machines through containers and Jupyter notebooks, other computational and analytic methods are enabled through "Software as a Service" and "Data as a Service" techniques via the deployment of the Cloud IDV, AWIPS EDEX Servers, and the THREDDS Data Server in the cloud. The collective impact of these services and tools is to enable scientists to use the Unidata Science Gateway capabilities to not only conduct their research but also share and collaborate with other researchers and advance the intertwined goals of Reproducibility of Science and Open Science, and in the process, truly enabling "Science as a Service".

We will present our work to date in developing the Unidata Science Gateway and the hosted services therein, as well as our future directions to benefit the atmospheric sciences community.