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7 posts tagged with "On-Premises Services"

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Powering CIROH DevCon 2026: How CIROH and 2i2c Ran Cloud Computing at Scale

· 9 min read
Arpita Patel
Assistant Director, IT and DevOpsAlabama Water Institute
April Johnson
Community and People Lead2i2c
Benjamin Lee
Development Operations EngineerAlabama Water Institute
Nia Minor
Graduate Research AssistantAlabama Water Institute
Harsha Vemula
DevOps EngineerAlabama Water Institute

At the 2026 CIROH Developers Conference (University of Utah, May 27–29) participants used a variety of tools and models on cloud infrastructure they'd never had to install, configure, or even think about. To enable that seamless experience, our Research Cyberinfrastructure team provisioned cloud resources for 15 hands-on workshops across three days in close collaboration with our partners at 2i2c. Here's what we ran, and how.

What we provisioned, by the numbers

Running an event of this scale requires more than just a single cloud context, as each workshop posed its own computing and data access requirements. CIROH Cyberinfrastructure met this challenge via a coordinated stack spanning multiple cloud providers and services. Across the 15 workshops that needed infrastructure (14 requests), the R2OHC cloud provisioned the following:

ProviderWorkshopsWhat it carried
2i2c JupyterHub on GCP12A mix of Small, Medium, Large, and GPU servers; 9 workshops ran on custom-built images
AWS3NRDS, HydroServer, TEEHR
Google NWM BigQuery API2Input data for Flood Inundation Mapping (multi-source DB / HAND visualization) and Hydroinformatics (Essential Geospatial Skills)
NSF Access1GPU-powered VMs for the "Talk to NRDS" LLM workshop

For 12 of these workshops, their backbone was the CIROH–2i2c JupyterHub, a managed JupyterHub environment that 2i2c operates on Google Cloud. For the conference, we provisioned a dedicated Workshop Hub: an ephemeral environment that lives only for the duration of the event and then spins back down.

DevCon 2025: A DevOps and Cyberinfrastructure Success Story

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise ArchitectAlabama Water Institute

The recent DevCon 2025 event showcased not just cutting-edge development practices, but also demonstrated how modern DevOps principles and cloud infrastructure can seamlessly support large-scale technical workshops. Our team had the privilege of providing IT infrastructure and support for over 200 attendees, creating a robust learning environment through an exemplary public-private partnership.

Image of CIROH's Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team. On the left, two graphs are shown depicting usage for the Google Cloud-2i2c and Jetstream2 environments.

CIROH's Research Cyberinfrastructure and DevOps team.
Left to right, top to bottom:
Manjila Singh, Arpita Patel, Nia Minor, Trupesh Patel, James Halgren; Benjamin Lee.

DevCon 2025: Hydroinformatics and Research CyberInfrastructure Keynote

· 5 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise ArchitectAlabama Water Institute

Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to co-present a keynote at the CIROH Developers Conference (DevCon 2025), which attracted over 200 attendees. This presentation, which I presented alongside Dan Ames, focused on "CIROH HydroInformatics and Research Cyberinfrastructure." It was a fantastic experience to share insights into the powerful tools and technologies that CIROH engineers, students, researchers have been developing to advance hydrological research and operations.


δHBV2.0: How NGIAB and Wukong HPC Streamlined Advanced Hydrologic Modeling

· 2 min read
Yalan Song
Research Assistant ProfessorPennsylvania State University
Leo Lonzarich
Graduate ResearcherPennsylvania State University
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise ArchitectAlabama Water Institute
James Halgren
Assistant Director of ScienceAlabama Water Institute

Image of graphical outputs from the δHBV2.0 model

Predicting water flow with precision across the vast U.S. landscape is a complex challenge. That's why Song et al. 2024 developed δHBV2.0, a cutting-edge hydrologic model. It’s built with high-resolution modeling of physics to deliver seamless, highly accurate streamflow simulations, even down to individual sub-basins. It's already proven to be a major improvement, performing better than older tools at about 4,000 measurement sites. We also provide a comprehensive 40-year water dataset for ~180,000 river reaches to support this.

Penn State research group pushed δHBV2.0 further, training it with even more detailed river data and integrating other trusted models, aiming to make it a key part of the NextGen national water modeling system (as a potential NWM3.0 successor). But here’s a common hurdle: making powerful scientific tools like this easy and reliable for everyone to use within a larger framework can be tough. Setup issues, runtime errors, and inconsistent results can frustrate users.

NGIAB stepped in to solve exactly this problem. Team has taken the complexity out of using the operations-ready models within NextGen by creating one unified, reliable package. Thanks to NGIAB, users don't have to worry about tricky setups or whether the model will run correctly. NGIAB ensures that our models are compatible everywhere and, most importantly, that they run exactly as designed, consistently and faithfully, every single time, no babysitting required. This means users get the full power of our advanced modeling, without the headaches.

Pennsylvania State University Researchers Leverage CIROH Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Hydrological Modeling

· 3 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise ArchitectAlabama Water Institute
Yalan Song
Research Assistant ProfessorPennsylvania State University
Tadd Bindas
Graduate ResearcherPennsylvania State University

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) researchers have been leveraging CIROH Cyberinfrastructure to tackle complex hydrological modeling challenges. This post highlights their innovative approach using the Wukong computing platform in conjunction with Amazon S3 bucket storage to efficiently process and analyze large-scale environmental datasets. 🚀

Monthly News Update - March 2024

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise ArchitectAlabama Water Institute
Accelerating Innovation: CIROH's March 2024 Update

The CIROH team has been diligently accelerating research cyberinfrastructure capabilities this month. We're thrilled to share key milestones achieved in enhancing the Community NextGen project and our cloud/on-premises platforms.

Monthly News Update - February 2024

· 2 min read
Arpita Patel
DevOps Manager and Enterprise ArchitectAlabama Water Institute

Welcome to the February edition of the CIROH Hub blog, where we bring you the latest updates and news about the Community NextGen project and CIROH's Cloud and on-premise Infrastructure.

Our team has been hard at work enhancing CIROH's Infrastructure and Community NextGen tools. Here are some highlights from February 2024:

  1. We successfully launched our new On-premises Infrastructure, which is now fully operational. You can find documentation for it here.