CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water (CJW) 2021 Q2 Release Notes

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 below.

1) Support for NCAR/UCAR WRFHydro Training Notebooks: Users are now able to set up the necessary environment to run WRFHydro hands-on training notebooks (https://ral.ucar.edu/projects/wrf_hydro/training-materials) through simple clicks on CJW. For details on how to run these training notebooks please review the following HydroShare resources: (a) WRFHydro Hands-on Training v5.2.x on CJW; and (b) WRF&WRFHydro Coupled Training v5.1.2 on CJW. This provides an alternative solution to the traditional Docker-based local setup (https://hub.docker.com/r/wrfhydro/training/) that makes it easy for users to complete this training as it does not require installation or downloading of any software or data onto the user’s local computer. Additionally, it enables users to access more powerful computing resources in a cloud-based Jupyter environment. All necessary materials required to complete the training are retrieved from official data sources managed by the NCAR/UCAR WRFHydro Development Team and accessible on CJW via a browser.

2) Transition from XSEDE Comet to Expanse: Comet HPC will be decommissioned on July 31, 2021 (https://portal.xsede.org/sdsc-comet), and all Comet allocations and resources awarded to HydroShare/CJW will be transferred to the Expanse HPC (https://portal.xsede.org/sdsc-expanse). As a result, the CyberGIS-Compute service will also drop the support on Comet and replace it with Expanse. Despite this change, we do not expect any action is required for the majority of users. The CyberGIS-Compute service and its SDK will redirect all jobs submitted to Comet to Expanse with a warning message showing up. All previously developed notebooks that use Comet will continue to run after this transition. Please contact us for solutions if you have models or notebooks that access Comet without going through the CyberGIS-Compute service.

3) Extended user testing of Kubernetes-based CJW instance: In the previous release, we announced a Kubernetes-based (Aka K8s: https://kubernetes.io/) CJW instance deployed at https://go.illinois.edu/cjw-k8s for user testing with a preliminary migration plan on deprecation of the current DockerSwarm-based CJW. Due to the growing complexity of K8s and more features being developed and added for a smooth user experience, we have decided to continue conducting extensive testing in this release. We encourage all users to join this testing process and would greatly appreciate your feedback. The current production CJW (http://go.illinois.edu/cybergis-jupyter-water) will continue to be available in parallel until a final migration plan is implemented.

Please refer to the following HydroShare resources for details and examples:
Run WRFHydro Hands-on Training v5.2.x on CJW
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/d2c6618090f34ee898e005969b99cf90/
Run WRF&WRFHydro Coupled Training v5.1.2 on CJW
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/c2389a2f05564da08ab218e59bdf1e81/
User testing on Kubernetes-based CJW:
https://go.illinois.edu/cjw-k8s
Set up OpenWith for Kubernetes-based CJW:
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/e9686eadd4474b6587d83d9330d25854/
See Release Notes on HydroShare
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/6a1ddb17155a4b27b885f442ad14e344/

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