The Research Platform
The Research Platform is a sophisticated, fully open-source, multi-tenant cloud environment specifically designed to support scientific workloads for NASA civil servants, contractors, and NASA-funded researchers, including ROSES grant recipients. Please note that the platform is currently in development and is in testing. To gain access and help evaluate the platform, please contact the Science Cloud Research and Innovation Lead, Ramon Ramirez-Linan, at ramon.e.ramirez-linan@nasa.gov. Built on a familiar JupyterLab foundation, it comes enhanced with curated tools for AI-assisted coding (Notebook Intelligence), parallel computing (Dask), and natural language dataset discovery (BExplorer).
This platform represents a significant architectural shift from the previous Open Science Studio (OSS) setup. Delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution operating on a pay-as-you-go model, it eliminates the $200–$300 per month fixed infrastructure baseline costs previously associated with maintaining an individual deployment in a dedicated AWS account. While you still pay to use the platform, costs are now distributed and directly tied to your actual compute and storage consumption—meaning you only pay for what you actively use. Because it is centralized, resources are managed and monitored with unprecedented granularity. The built-in Resource Tracker provides transparent, real-time reporting of compute costs and usage metrics. This allows individual researchers to monitor their own usage against soft spending limits, while Principal Investigators (PIs) gain comprehensive visibility to track consumption across their entire project portfolio and enforce hard budget limits.
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Science and Technology Authorization Realm
The Science and Technology Authorization Realm (STAR) is an open-source, Keycloak-based identity-management and authorization platform supporting NASA research ecosystems. STAR uses a one realm per tenant model. Each onboarded application receives a dedicated Keycloak realm, with user groups and roles configured within that realm according to the tenant's audience and access requirements. STAR is highly customizable for realm administrators and integrates with identity providers like InCommon, ORCID, Login.gov, and various major social media platforms.
The infrastructure runs on AWS and is scaled across multiple availability zones to ensure STAR stays highly available to support the research community, NASA internal users, federated partners, and a wide range of applications.
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Shared Services Available on the Science Cloud
The Science Cloud will provide
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a suite of essential shared services designed to
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streamline collaboration and project management across the platform.
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These services are centrally managed and available to all participating projects, removing the need for individual teams to deploy or maintain their own instances.
Included services:
- GitLab – Version control and code repository management
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- Mattermost – A communication and
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- notification platform for operational updates.
- Jira – Project tracking, task management, and issue reporting.
- Confluence – An organized workspace for documentation and knowledge sharing.
By integrating these tools directly into the Science Cloud infrastructure,
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projects can immediately access reliable, enterprise‑supported collaboration tools without the overhead of standalone setup or maintenance.
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Support for Additional Low-Level Cloud Service Providers
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