What is CyVerse?

CyVerse started out in 2008 as the NSF-funded ‘iPlant Collaborative’ project to help the changing needs of the life sciences, which have increasingly heavy computational demands (think protein folding, genetic phenotyping, etc. etc.), but have historically not had high-performance computing facilities. The project was rechristened ‘CyVerse’ in 2015.

Why should an astronomer care about it?

CyVerse cyberinfrastructure has the serendipitous effect of providing computational resources to basically anyone here at UA and >8,000 participating institutions.

Possible reasons to care:

  • If you have computational needs that are greater than what your office machines can provide, but less than what would usually pass for HPC jobs
  • If you want to calculate something now, and don’t want to put your job in a queue
  • Very flexible for access remotely or from low-performance machines (basically all you need to do is ‘ssh’)
  • This infrastructure serves as a lead-in for addressing needs that span the community, like interoperability and reproducibility.

This talk was presented in a Jupyter Notebook which can be viewed on GitHub or downloaded directly.