CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water (CJW) 2021 Q3 Release Notes

Dear CUAHSI community members,

We are pleased to announce a new quarterly release of the CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water (CJW) platform at https://go.illinois.edu/cybergis-jupyter-water. This release includes several new capabilities and features summarized as follows.

1)Community Commons for Easy Access to HydroShare Notebooks:
Reproducible computational notebooks have become increasingly important in hydrologic research and education. CJW now provides a friendly user interface for accessing HydroShare-related notebooks at https://cybergisxhub.cigi.illinois.edu/hydroshare/. Interested in learning how CJW enables computational reproducibility of such notebooks? Read on!

2)Enhanced Reproducibility of CJW:
Starting from this release, CJW has implemented a new solution in kernel and software management such that each notebook is now associated with a specific versioned kernel. This approach significantly enhances reproducibility in the CJW environment as each notebook is always opened with the original kernel it is tied to. We encourage users to test their notebooks and reach out to us if you experience any problems.

3)Transferring Large Model Output Datasets:
CJW has introduced a new Globus-based (https://www.globus.org/) data-transfer capability to enhance the performance and stability of transferring a large number of model outputs from high-performance computing (HPC) resources back to CJW, which is a common scenario in running hydrologic models.

4)Seamless Transition from XSEDE Comet to Expanse:
Comet was decommissioned on July 15, 2021 (https://portal.xsede.org/sdsc-comet), and all Comet allocations and resources awarded to HydroShare/CJW have been transferred to the Expanse (https://portal.xsede.org/sdsc-expanse). The CyberGIS-Compute service and its SDK now automatically redirect all jobs submitted to Comet to Expanse while prompting users with a simple warning message.

Please refer to the following HydroShare resources for details and examples:
Community Commons for Easy Access to HydroShare Notebooks
https://cybergisxhub.cigi.illinois.edu/hydroshare/
Enhanced Reproducibility of CJW
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/df8244042e5445edb106d93e5a491d29/
Transferring Large Model Output Datasets
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/5aa3d27ec5ef4b1b8dfa621ea284af14/
See Release Notes on HydroShare
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/f3315ec8c1df4f4ab5d2274220de0351/

Please let us know if you have any questions or run into any problems ([e-mail]). Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
CyberGIS-Hydro team