Booth Abstract

Demo Booth (D12) Jai Won Kim (JHU-IDIES)

SciServer: Collabroative data-driven science

The SciServer team is pleased to announce its final production system of SciServer, offered free to the scientific community for collaborative scientific research and education.
We will present and demonstrate the latest updated version of the SciServer science platform. SciServer is an online environment for working with scientific big data, and specifically data sets hosted within our ecosystem. Researchers, educators, students, and citizen scientists can create a free account to get 10 GB of file storage space and access to a virtual machine computing environment. Users can run Python, R, or Matlab scripts in that environment through Jupyter notebooks. Scripts can be run either in Interactive mode, which displays results within the notebook, or in Batch mode, which writes results to the user’s personal database and/or filesystem.
SciServer hosts a number of datasets from various science domains; within astronomy, it features all data releases of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), as well as other datasets from GALEX, Gaia, and other projects. It also contains all the data sets from the Millennium suite of simulations and provides advanced access to its raw data. The SciServer system also incorporates the popular SkyServer, CasJobs, and SkyQuery astronomy research websites, meaning that SciServer Compute offers APIs to read and write from these resources. All these features ensure that computation stays close to data, resulting in faster computation therefore faster science.
SciServer also allows users to create and manage scientific collaborations around data and analysis resources. You can create groups and invite collaborators from around the world. You and your collaborators can use these groups as workspaces to share datasets, scripts, and plots, leading to more efficient collaboration.
We will present a highly interactive demo of SciServer, highlighting the latest features and with an emphasis on science use cases. Please bring your questions – let us know what you have not yet been able to do with SciServer, and we will help you do it. We are actively looking for new collaborations, feature requests, and scientific use cases. Please let us know how we can help you do your science!