Vocabulary

This page explains some of the terms encountered during Cyberseminars and links to resources on where to learn more about them.

Platforms

Hydroshare: an online, collaborative Hydrologic Information System for sharing hydrologic data, models, and code.

Software Libraries

Numpy: NumPy is a library for the Python programming language, adding support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a large collection of high-level mathematical functions to operate on these arrays.

Matplotlib: Matplotlib is a plotting library for the Python programming language and its numerical mathematics extension NumPy. It provides an object-oriented API for embedding plots into applications.

Pandas: Pandas is a software library written for the Python programming language for data manipulation and analysis. In particular, it offers data structures and operations for manipulating numerical tables and time series.

Anaconda: Anaconda is a free and open-source distribution of the Python and R programming languages for scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment.

Tools and Methods

Jupyter Notebooks: The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more

Docker: An image is a executable package that includes everything needed to run a piece of software, including the code, a runtime, libraries, environment variables, and configuration files. A container is a runtime instance of an image – what the image becomes in memory when actually executed. It runs completely isolated from the host environment by default, only accessing host files and ports if configured to do so.

Landlab – a Python-based modeling environment that allows scientists and students to build numerical landscape models.

Acronyms

WHW: Waterhackweek :)

CUAHSI: The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. is a 501(c) 3 research organization representing more than 100 U.S. universities and international water science-related organizations. In addition to HydroShare NSF PI and community support, CUAHSI will maintain, develop and support HydroShare infrastructure and users.

XSEDE: The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise.

CyberGIS - a center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies. They support big geospatial data solutions in many areas of scholarship, ranging from engineering and science to the humanities.

AGU: American Geophysical Union

H&H: Hydrologic and Hydraulic

NCSA - National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ROGER - Resourcing Open Geospatial Education and Research and the Father of GIS, Roger Tomlinson) is the world's first-ever CyberGIS Supercomputer designed especially for computationally intensive geospatial data processing and analysis. ROGER is managed by NCSA at the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies

Public Cloud - publicly accessible to anyone for scalable research computing supported by commercial platforms. Option 1: write a proposal to include funding to pay for the cloud.

Publicly Funded Research and Education Cloud - Federal resources are available to support you and your research computing needs, as well as research community software development and cyberinfrastructure. National Science Foundation funded platforms like CUAHSI JuptyerHub, CyberGIS for Water, The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). Option 2: write a proposal to access the compute resources for your research. HydroShare and Jupyterhub teams have done the work to make it easy to launch 'to cloud' this week - that is one server (now on Google, used to be RENCI in North Carolina) that CUAHSI pays for as part of our collaborative NSF CyberTraining grant.