COS 133-9 - Analyzing and managing ecological data with CyVerse

Thursday, August 10, 2017: 10:50 AM
B114, Oregon Convention Center
Ramona L. Walls, Blake Joyce, Tyson Swetnam and Upendra Kumar Devisetty, CyVerse, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Background/Question/Methods

CyVerse, formerly known as the iPlant Collaborative, is a US National Science Foundation (NSF) funded initiative “to design, deploy, and expand a national cyberinfrastructure for life sciences research, and to train scientists in its use” (http://www.cyverse.org/about). CyVerse’s flexible, free, open-source cyberinfrastructure is suitable for ecological research that requires access to shared data storage, analysis of very large data sets, high performance computing, or cloud computing. If reproducible science is important to you, CyVerse has multiple resources to support reproducibility.

Results/Conclusions

This presentation will provide an overview of the tools and services available through CyVerse, with an emphasis on their utility to ecologists and educators. CyVerse functions include: data storage, sharing, publishing, and discovery through the Data Commons; cloud-based computing through Atmosphere; web-based access to hundreds of applications through the Discovery Environment; access to any networked high performance computing system in the US via the Agave API; and image management and analysis with Bisque. New tools for geospatial analysis and tools that make use of R-Studio and Jupyter notebooks may be of particular interest to ecologists. CyVerse also provides platforms for developers and informaticians to share their tools with the ecological community via virtual machines or containers (Docker or BioContainer) via the web without the hassle of maintaining a website. CyVerse has numerous resources available to educators, including a dedicated education cloud, DNA Subway (for high school students and undergraduate education), and numerous webinars and online tutorials.