In February, the Berkeley Open Source Program Office (OSPO) hosted a monthly meetup “Open Science as a Process, Not a Product” with presenter Tasha Snow. Snow, a research scientist who co-founded the CryoCloud geoscience cloud-computing community and received the 2023 American Geophysical Union Open Science Recognition Prize, shared insights from the CryoCloud JupyterHub community and highlighted how open source infrastructure enables teams to connect data, tools, and people into a shared research ecosystem increasing scientific impact.
Photo: Attendees intently listen to Tasha Snow as she responds to questions from Fernando Pérez about her CryoCloud work.
What is CryoCloud?
CryoCloud is a cloud computing community and platform designed for geoscientists. This was originally formed to support the team of scientists working with data from the NASA ICESat-2, a laser altimeter that measures the surface elevation of the Earth. At the time, the science team faced challenges building and maintaining a cloud infrastructure in a cost-effective manner. To address this, Snow and her collaborators built a shared computing environment using JupyterHub.
CryoCloud Today
Although the name ‘CryoCloud’ suggests specific focus on cryosphere research, the platform and community have evolved to now serve a broader community including oceanography, hydrology, vegetation and atmospheric sciences, geology, and marine ecology along with additional NASA products such as PACE (responsible for aerosols and oceanography). CryoCloud will soon be rebranded to reflect the diverse geoscience research community being supported.
Cloud Workshops and Workflows
Along with providing cloud infrastructure, Snow and her team actively focus on providing training and workshops to help researchers work effectively with cloud resources. Snow also develops best practices for cloud-based scientific workflows.
Open Science as a Process
In her presentation, Snow expressed her motto for open science as a process rather than a product. She highlights that open science tools and infrastructure are all about enabling science. It’s not solely about building effective tools, but also about building the communities and workflows around them.
One of the attendees, Sam Teplitzky, reflected that “Tasha Snow’s work on CryoCloud shows how transformative open science can be for research and collaboration.” In Teplitzky’s own work as an Open Science Librarian and library liaison to the Earth & Planetary Sciences and Astronomy Departments at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she often needs examples of projects that "walk the walk" and really looks forward to introducing others to Cryocloud as a model for emerging open science projects.
Photo: After the talk, attendees gather to discuss insights and related projects.
CryoCloud sets a good example of how infrastructures enable communities to build and grow together, enabling further collaboration and discoveries – and the conversations at the meetup reflect the work of BIDS and OSPO, fostering open and collaborative research ecosystems. The OSPO, in particular, serves as a central hub at UC Berkeley to facilitate, coordinate, and support open source initiatives and best practices in the research community.
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