Shared Services Available on the Science Cloud
The Science Cloud will provide a suite of essential shared services designed to streamline collaboration and project management across the platform. 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.
- Mattermost – A communication and 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, projects can immediately access reliable, enterprise‑supported collaboration tools without the overhead of standalone setup or maintenance.
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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
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support team at support@sciencecloud.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 a centralized identity-management and authorization platform supporting NASA research ecosystems. STAR uses an isolated, per-tenant model to ensure security and privacy. Each onboarded application receives a dedicated environment, with user groups and roles configured according to the tenant's audience and access requirements. STAR is highly customizable for administrators and integrates seamlessly with major external identity providers, including InCommon, ORCID, and Login.gov.
The infrastructure runs on a highly available cloud architecture scaled across multiple availability zones to ensure STAR stays reliable to support the research community, NASA internal users, federated partners, and a wide range of applications Cloud will provide several essential shared services to support collaboration and project management across the platform. GitLab will be available for version control and code repository management, Mattermost will serve as a communication and collaboration platform, and Jira will be provided for project tracking and issue management. These services will be included as part of the Science Cloud infrastructure, eliminating the need for individual projects to maintain their own instances of these tools.
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Support for Additional Low-Level Cloud Service Providers
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