Authors: Sai Harsha Vemula, Arpita Patel, Benjamin Lee, Kamal, Nia, Manjila – Alabama Water Institute, The University of Alabama
Title: Research Cyberinfrastructure at CIROH: A Multi-Hybrid Cloud and HPC Platform for Advancing Hydrologic Science
Presentation Type: Poster Presentation
Abstract: The Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) operates a multi-hybrid cyberinfrastructure that integrates commercial cloud, on-premises HPC, and NSF-funded national resources to accelerate hydrologic research and the development of the NextGen National Water Model. This poster presents the platform’s architecture, usage, and impact across the CIROH consortium. Over the past year, the platform has supported more than 100research projects and 500 unique users across four working groups. Amazon Web Services hosts 24 projects spanning 18 linked accounts with ~96 active IAM identities, with workloads dominated by EC2 compute (~36%), S3 storage (~24%), and EBS/NAT/data-transfer (~30%), alongside managed services including EKS, EFS, RDS, and SageMaker. Google Cloud Platform, deployed in partnership with 2i2c, supports 50 JupyterHub-based projects engaging 171 users, with Compute Engine (70.3%) and Cloud Filestore (21.2%) as primary cost drivers. On-premises HPC systems (Pantarhei and Wukong, with V100 and A100 GPUs) support 20 additional projects, while NSF ACCESS allocations on JetStream2 and Anvil enable 8 projects with 27 users. The CIROH Hub knowledge platform now serves a globally distributed community spanning seven countries. This infrastructure underpins flagship CIROH outputs including the NWM API, NextGen In A Box (NGIAB), the National Research DataStream (NRDS), HydroShare, TEEHR, HydroServer, and the CIROH Portal. We describe DevOps practices, Cloud–HPC integration patterns, security posture, and cost-optimization strategies — that have enabled scale, reliability, and reproducibility for community research, and outline ongoing work to strengthen cyberinfrastructure in support of NOAA’s research-to-operations-to-research (R2O2R) mission.