HelioCloud Leads Heliophysics Research into the Cloud Computing Revolution

Announcing HelioCloud – a new, collaborative, cloud-based tool for heliophysics scientists and students to rapidly access and analyze high-volume datasets from a web browser. With an easy-to-navigate interface and generous data storage, HelioCloud offers a streamlined approach to conduct research.HelioCloud Logo

Work in the Cloud, Download Results

This free and open-source platform offers a virtual software environment with high performance computing capabilities to run code and plot, visualize, and analyze data without needing to download any software. HelioCloud holds up to ten thousand times the data storage of most laptops – it’s like having big data on demand. This allows users to expedite research by working with large datasets stored in the cloud and then downloading only the results. HelioCloud’s searchable registry includes 600 terabytes of data from NASA’s Heliophysics Digital Resource Library (HDRL), the data ingest and archive for heliophysics missions. 

An Image of the Sun, showing bright loops of yellow plasma, taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory
Access data from SDO AIA (pictured), SDO HMI, MMS, and all of CDAWeb rapidly via HelioCloud. Credit: NASA/SDO

Easy Local Access

Researchers who prefer to work with software stored on their own computer can download and install HelioCloud as a virtualized operating system container that includes a reusable software stack with all of the components needed to replicate and run the program locally. This container includes heliophysics software applications written in Python programming languages, like SunPy and PySPEDAS, as well as integrated development environments including Daskhub and Jupyter Notebooks. 

Built for Collaboration

HelioCloud provides an open science framework that breaks down barriers to collaboration by enabling multipoint access to shared data, code, and analysis tools in a secure environment. Users can automatically access data made public by NASA and other HelioCloud communities, and safely store, modify, and share code with stable runtime environments. 

This community-based project is supported by NASA and led by a development team at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. HelioCloud invites heliophysics researchers from NASA and other research labs as well as universities to join the project as users or developers and take part in the game-changing evolution of big-data analysis. 

Visit HelioCloud.org for more info.
Mailing list: heliocloud@groups.io

By Rose Brunning
Communications Lead
NASA Heliophysics Digital Resource Library (HDRL)