Purdue RCAC partners with faculty on NSF-funded cybertraining platform, workshops
Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) chief scientist Carol Song has continued building on an NSF-funded project with a Purdue faculty team led by Venkatesh Merwade, professor of civil engineering, to create a cybertaining curriculum for climate, water and environmental (CWE) sustainability. The team has recently built a new platform that not only hosts training material, but also provides seamless access to computational resources, and has increased collaboration with high schools and community colleges to reach students who have likely not yet had exposure to these topics.
Song is a co-PI on the grant, along with Wanju Huang, a clinical associate professor of learning design and technology, and Jacob Hosen, an assistant professor in the department of forestry and natural resources.
The platform Song’s RCAC team developed, CyberFaCES, is designed to deliver cybertrainings in various science domains. Currently, the platform hosts a suite of CWE learning modules that involve the use of online data and tools to address issues related to CWE sustainability. The users of CyberFaCES modules use Jupyter Notebooks to access and process data and perform computational tasks. One or more modules are then packaged to offer learners badges, courses and certifications.
With collaborator Adnan Rajib at the University of Texas at Arlington, the team has also worked on introducing the CWE sustainability curriculum to students at the high school and college levels.
PI Merwade estimates that more than 200 students at this level have completed some CWE cybertraining, and in some of them it has sparked a continuing interest in the subjects that has led them to pursue higher education in related areas.
The team also offers more advanced training modules for researchers working in these areas, including through some in-person workshops, such as the recent Cyberinfastructure for FAIR Science (CI4FAIR) workshops held at Purdue in August.
The goal of this hands-on workshop was to help participants become familiar with the tools developed under several grants in order to make research data and workflows more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). The workshop activities were organized around three themes:
- Wrangling data – resource intensive data processing pipelines using the GeoEDF workflow library
- Managing continuous data streams – sensor data management with StreamCI
- Cyber training – interactive online learning using the CyberFaCES platform
The topics of high-performance computing and the use of virtual containers to improve the scale of computation and make research software more accessible and maintainable also attracted a lot of interest from the attendees.
"The CI4FAIR workshop at Purdue was an outstanding opportunity to connect with researchers who are advancing the frontiers of hydrologic modeling and cyberinfrastructure,” says Ayman Nassar, a hydrology postdoc at the Utah Water Lab who participated.
“I particularly valued the emphasis on collaboration and reproducibility, which are central to my own work on large-scale hydrologic modeling and data sharing. The discussions and hands-on sessions provided practical insights that I plan to apply directly to my research on integrating cyberinfrastructure and geospatial information to support the NextGen National Water Model framework. This workshop not only strengthened my technical skills but also reinforced the importance of building a collaborative hydrologic community to accelerate research-to-operations transitions."
“In only two days, this workshop introduced me to so much content that is relevant to my research, including GeoEDF, StreamCI and CyberFaCES,” says Yalin Yang, a GIS research associate and developer at West Virginia University.
“I feel very excited about these tools, because they’re very powerful and will simplify our research workflows.”
This work is supported by NSF Award Nos. 2230092 and 1829764.
To learn more about Purdue Center for Research Software Engineering and other Research Computing resources, visit the RCAC website or contact rcac-help@purdue.edu.