GISandbox

The GISandbox is ready for users. After over a year of work and preparation the GISandbox is transitioning from prototype to production. We would like to acknowledge the NSF-supported Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS) team including Davide Del Vento, Andrea Zonca, and Jun Wang as well as the Science Gateway Community Institute (SGCI) including Mark Krenz. Without their dedication and expertise the GISandbox would still be a wish rather than a fully functioning gateway. The GISandbox gateway runs a JupyterLab interface with a host of open source packages to enable geospatial research. We are putting the finishing touches on the notebook submit option that enables users to take their Jupyter Notebooks and run them on the Comet and Bridges supercomputers. If you are interested in signing up to be a GISandbox user for geospatial education and research, then please follow the 3 steps below. 1. To sign-in, us

The front-facing website for GISandbox has been very quiet, but a lot has been going on behind the scenes. We are now reaching a stage where we are emerging from stealth mode. GISandbox is transitioning from alpha-stage prototype into post-prototype and working toward production. Why? Science gateways are a tremendous resource for researchers, educators, and students, but they take time to build. GISandbox is no exception. In the past year we have been working behind-the-scenes to ensure a secure and seamless environment for all users. We have a growing list of pilot users. If you are interested in joining please contact Eric Shook ( eshook@umn.edu ) or leave a comment. We hope to make play.gisandbox.org available for everyone by the end of the year so stay tuned, because we are now sharing all of our exciting work. Credit: Icons made by  Iconnice  from  www.flaticon.com  is licensed by  CC 3.0 BY

Good news!   XSEDE has approved the Startup Allocation for the GISandbox.  We are working hard to get GISandbox up and running with the latest commercial and open source software. This allocation grants GISandbox users access to the following supercomputers and cloud resources: 1. Jetstream (Indiana University / Texas Advanced Computing Center) https://jetstream-cloud.org Jetstream will host our Virtual Machine running JupyterHub, which will serve as the primary interface for GISandbox users. 2. Bridges (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) https://www.psc.edu/bridges Bridges will be a primary compute resource, which is designed for non-traditional high-performance computing (HPC) users like the GIScience community. 3. Comet (San Diego Supercomputing Center) http://www.sdsc.edu/services/hpc/hpc_systems.html#comet Comet will be another primary compute resource, which is also designed for non-traditional (HPC) users. As SDSC likes to say "HPC for the 99 perce

I'm excited to share the ArcGIS for XSEDE webinar hosted by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and Esri (Full title: An Overview of Esri Cloud and Big Data Spatial Analytics Offerings Available to XSEDE ). We had over 70 participants join the webinar and I had many requests for the recording.  Please share the presentation with anyone who might be interested. GISandbox (the site you are currently reading) will serve as the 'core communication channel' for many of these GIS+XSEDE activities so please check back or subscribe to stay up-to-date with the latest information and opportunities. Of course, if you have questions or would like to get involved feel free to get in contact with the presenters or myself, Eric Shook (eshook@umn.edu). An Overview of Esri Cloud and Big Data Spatial Analytics Offerings Available to XSEDE (Link to PDF Slides)

Welcome to GISandbox.  A new play place for curious researchers and educators to explore the capabilities of Geographic Information Systems and Science (GIS) when coupled with High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Cyberinfrastructure (CI). We will cover a broad array of topics and technologies spanning (on the geospatial side) GIS, spatial analysis, spatial modeling, agent-based models, and cellular automata as well as (on the computational side) high-performance computing, data-intensive computing, interactive computing, Python programming, and of course big data.