Cyberhubs: Virtual Research Environments for Astronomy

TL;DR

Cyberhubs provides a user-friendly, Docker-based virtual research environment that enables astronomers to collaboratively analyze large, complex datasets remotely via web browsers, addressing key cyber infrastructure challenges.

Contribution

This paper introduces Cyberhubs, a deployable system leveraging Jupyter and Docker to facilitate remote, interactive data analysis for astronomy collaborations.

Findings

Supports collaborative analysis of large heterogeneous datasets.

Enables remote access to complex astrophysical data and tools.

Used successfully by NuGrid and PPMstar collaborations.

Abstract

Collaborations in astronomy and astrophysics are faced with numerous cyber infrastructure challenges, such as large data sets, the need to combine heterogeneous data sets, and the challenge to effectively collaborate on those large, heterogeneous data sets with significant processing requirements and complex science software tools. The cyberhubs system is an easy-to-deploy package for small to medium-sized collaborations based on the Jupyter and Docker technology, that allows web-browser enabled, remote, interactive analytic access to shared data. It offers an initial step to address these challenges. The features and deployment steps of the system are described, as well as the requirements collection through an account of the different approaches to data structuring, handling and available analytic tools for the NuGrid and PPMstar collaborations. NuGrid is an international collaboration that creates stellar evolution and explosion physics and nucleosynthesis simulation data. The PPMstar collaboration performs large-scale 3D stellar hydrodynamics simulation of interior convection in the late phases of stellar evolution. Examples of science that is presently performed on cyberhubs, in the areas 3D stellar hydrodynamic simulations, stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis and Galactic chemical evolution, are presented.