NASA Champions 2024: Data strategies for when to use cloud, coding strategies for parallelization, & first examples of big science in the Cloud

Abstract

From April-May 2024, the NASA Mentors who span eleven Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) co-led the third Champions Cohort with the NASA Openscapes project team, this year focusing on, teaching lessons they adapted for geospatial and cloud analysis. The Cohort included nine international research teams from academia and government that were curious about working with NASA Earthdata in the Cloud. Many teams were interested in using data from multiple DAACs. User cloud adaption takes time, given the new conceptual mindsets and technical skillsets it requires. During the ten weeks we worked together, NASA Mentors refined and extended previous lessons to focus on thinking through and planning the transition to using the Cloud for science research and applications, and initial experiments using the Cloud through our 2i2c JupyterHub. Below are these updates and YouTube clips! There were also recurring themes/questions that we have heard before, some of which remain as open questions and continue to remain a challenge. Importantly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud onboarding, when to use what resources, how to set them up, and how to discuss needs with organizational leadership and IT staff, which often falls outside the scope of NASA DAACs, yet it’s a key element of helping users adopt the Cloud and use NASA data in the Cloud. It is encouraging to hear some of the champions starting to have conversations with their institutions, IT departments, and making their needs known, which is likely a big part of the solution, too. We are thankful to NASA Openscapes Champions for informing and nudging these conversations! All of this work is underpinned by Openscapes and NASA’s commitment to open science practices and a kinder collaborative culture. This cohort is funded by NASA and is part of our NASA Openscapes Framework project.