The Research Platform
The Research Platform is a sophisticated multi-tenant, cloud-based environment specifically designed to support the execution of scientific workloads through Jupyter notebooks and a variety of other computational tools. This platform represents a significant architectural shift from the previous Open Science Studio (OSS) setup that many researchers may be familiar with. It is delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, which fundamentally changes how resources are managed and monitored. One of the key advantages of this approach is the platform's ability to provide detailed tracking and transparent reporting of compute costs and resource usage metrics at both the individual user level and the project level. This granular visibility means that individual researchers can monitor and review their own usage patterns and associated costs, while Principal Investigators (PIs) gain comprehensive visibility into resource consumption and spending across their entire project portfolio. An important benefit of this centralized model is that it eliminates the baseline infrastructure costs that were previously associated with maintaining an individual Open Science Studio deployment running in your own dedicated AWS account.
Shared Services Available on the Science Cloud
The Science 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.
Support for Additional Low-Level Cloud Service Providers
The Science Cloud team recognizes the interest in expanding support for additional low-level cloud service providers beyond the current offerings. Specifically, platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), CloudFlare, Wasabi S3, and Tigris S3 have been identified and documented as requested features in the development backlog. However, at the present time, there is no concrete implementation plan or timeline established for integrating these additional cloud service providers in the immediate future. The team continues to evaluate priorities and may revisit these requests as the platform evolves.
Process for Adopting New SaaS Provider Tools
Projects and individual teams maintain the flexibility to continue onboarding and integrating new technologies and SaaS solutions into their workflows, provided that these tools are not explicitly blacklisted or prohibited from use within the NASA environment. It is the responsibility of individual teams to conduct due diligence and identify whether their chosen software has been approved for use within NASA's IT ecosystem. In cases where a specific software application or service is being utilized or under consideration by a widespread audience spanning multiple teams, the Science Cloud team is open to evaluating it as a potential candidate for inclusion as a shared service that could benefit the broader community. If you have interest in specific software solutions and would like to explore the possibility of having them supported directly by the Science Cloud infrastructure, please submit a detailed ticket to support@sciencecloud.nasa.gov with information about the tool and its potential applications.