The XSEDE Monthly HPC Workshops

Presenter(s): John Urbanic (PSC)

Presentation Slides

I will talk about the XSEDE Monthly Workshop Series, which uses the Wide Area Classroom. It has exceeded 10,500 actual-sitting-in-the-classroom students over the past 5 years, with growth continuing. The HPC topics core to the series will be discussed, as will the benefits of the WAC approach. We will discuss audience satisfaction and demographics as well as discuss the latest improvements and developments. All of this with the intention that many of these techniques are of use to other XSEDE outreach, training and education efforts.

GISandbox: A Science Gateway for Geospatial Computing

Presenter(s): Davide Del Vento (NCAR)

Presentation Slides

Science gateways provide easy access to domain-specific tools and data. The field of Geographic Information Science and Systems (GIS) uses myriad tools and datasets, which raises challenges in designing a science gateway to meet users' diverse research and teaching needs. GISandbox is a new science gateway designed to meet the needs of researchers and educators leveraging geospatial computing. The GISandbox is built on Jupyter Notebooks to create an easy, open, and flexible platform for geospatial computing. Jupyter Notebooks is a widely used interactive computing environment running in the browser that integrates live code, narrative, equations and images. We extend the Jupyter Notebook platform to enable users to run interactive notebooks on the cloud resource Jetstream or computationally-intensive notebooks on the Bridges supercomputer located at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. A novel Job Management platform allows the user to easily submit a Jupyter Notebook for batch execution on Bridges (and eventually Comet), monitor the SLURM job, and retrieve output files. GISandbox Virtual Machines are created in Jetstream's Atmosphere interface and then deployed and configured using a series of Ansible scripts. When properly used, Ansible scripts allow to create an easily reproducible and scalable system. In this talk we will highlight use cases of GISandbox, give a bird's view on how we have met their requirements in our implementation and discuss future plans including how it could be applied in other domains.