Cyberhubs: Virtual Research Environments for Astronomy

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.

arXiv comment19 pages, 9 figures, ApJ Supplement Special Issue on Data, accepted

References in corpus (7)

• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Giant Planets, Oscillations, Rotation, and Massive Stars
• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Binaries, Pulsations, and Explosions
• Abundances of the elements in the solar system
• NuGrid stellar data set I. Stellar yields from H to Bi for stars with metallicities Z = 0.02 and Z = 0.01
• Global non-spherical oscillations in 3-D $4\pi$ simulations of the H-ingestion flash
• Idealised hydrodynamic simulations of turbulent oxygen-burning shell convection in 4π geometry

Cited by in corpus (7)

• NuGrid Stellar Data Set. II. Stellar Yields from H to Bi for Stellar Models with Mzams = 1 to 25Msun and Z = 0.0001 to 0.02
• 3D hydrodynamic simulations of C ingestion into a convective O shell
• Galactic Chemical Evolution of Radioactive Isotopes
• SYGMA: Stellar Yields for Galactic Modeling Applications
• Study of (${}^6$Li, $d$) and (${}^6$Li, $t$) reactions on ${}^{22}$Ne and implications for $s$-process nucleosynthesis
• Chromium Nucleosynthesis and Silicon-Carbon Shell Mergers in Massive Stars
• Project ThaiPASS: International Outreach Blending Astronomy and Python