Facilitating Collaborative Science using HydroShare and Jupyter Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks are becoming popular among the geoscience community for there ability to clearly present, disseminate, and describe scientific findings in a transparent and reproducible manner. This also makes them a desirable mechanism for sharing and collaborating scientific data and workflows with colleagues during the research process, especially when addressing large-scale cross-disciplinary geoscience issues. This work extends Jupyter notebooks to operate in a pre-configured cloud environment that is integrated with HydroShare for its data sharing and collaboration functionality, and notebooks are executed on the Resourcing Open Geospatial Education and Research (ROGER) supercomputer hosted in the CyberGIS center. This design enables researchers to address problems that are often larger in scale than can be done on a typical desktop computer. Additionally, the integration of these technologies enables researchers to collaborate on notebook workflows that execute in the cloud and are shared through the HydroShare platform. The goals of this work are to establish an open source platform for domain scientists to (1) conduct data intensive and computationally intensive collaborative research, and (2) organize data driven educational material via classroom modules, workshops, or training courses. This presentation will discuss recent efforts towards achieving these goals, and describe the architectural design of the notebook server in an effort to support collaborative and reproducible science.