POSE: Phase I: Evolving Exosphere with Community-Driven Software Stewardship

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Exosphere is an innovative web-based interface for non-proprietary cloud computing infrastructure. Exosphere empowers researchers to wield advanced cloud-based research tools without needing advanced systems administrator skills. The project's novelties include: providing a user-friendly dashboard to manage cloud computing, networking, and data storage resources, and providing interactive access to these resources via web browser. Uniquely, Exosphere can provide access to most research-focused cloud systems without custom integration work. The project seeks to increase the productivity of researchers and reduce the time to scientific discoveries. Exosphere achieves these goals by closing the gap between the power of cloud-enabled research techniques and their accessibility to researchers. Exosphere also enables computational literacy and workforce development with distributed workshops. Investigators and community contributors build Exosphere with a fully public development process. They deliver the result as free and open-source software. This approach has made Exosphere the most widely-used interface for Jetstream2, a national-scale research cloud. It has also resulted in advanced features such as push-button elastic virtual clusters and reproducible data science workbenches. Exosphere can grow to serve use cases across the research community and beyond, as it is compatible with the OpenStack Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) used at hundreds of companies and not-for-profit organizations. A Phase I award from the Pathways for Enabling Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program enables Exosphere’s organizational and community development activities. These tasks include discovery of the user and contributor ecosystem via surveys and engagements at conferences, evaluating organization and governance models in collaboration with mentors, and developing a contributor engagement plan, user documentation, and a website. The successful result will be a fully-developed strategy to multiply and sustain the benefit of Exosphere to research computing and society at large. 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.