Collaborative Research: EarthCube Data Capabilities: Project Pythia: A Community Learning Resource for Geoscientists

University Corporation For Atmospheric Res, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Project Pythia will provide a public, web-accessible training resource that will help educate current, and aspiring, earth scientists to more effectively use both the Scientific Python Ecosystem and Cloud Computing to make sense of huge volumes of numerical scientific data. Numerical simulations run on supercomputers are used in the study of climate, weather, atmospheric chemistry, wildfires, space weather, and more. Similarly, a tremendous volume of digital data produced by numerical simulations, or observations made with instruments, are analyzed with the help of powerful computers and software. Scientists thus need to be able to effectively analyze, manipulate, and make sense of potentially vast volumes of data. This project focuses on two technologies that have emerged and are being adopted by scientific communities relatively recently: Cloud Computing platforms and a software ecosystem of scientific tools built around the open source programming language called Python. Project Pythia will construct and deploy a trusted, community-oriented education and training resource to improve computing literacy in all areas relevant to the analysis of geoscientific data, with a particular emphasis on moving workflows to the Cloud. Project Pythia will leverage Jupyter Notebooks as the primary delivery mechanism for training examples, curricula, and as an interactive computing platform. The content for Project Pythia will be hosted on GitHub and maintained using an Open Development model that will facilitate and encourage contributions from a broad user community, as well as help ensure the long-term sustainability of the project. Content development and new user growth will be catalyzed through data-intensive classroom and research activities at SUNY at Albany. The result will be one of the world's go-to, community-owned sites for geoscientists and students who want to know what tools to use and how to use them to explore geoscience data. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.