CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water Quarterly Release Announcement (2022 Q1) [full-version]

Dear CUAHSI community members,

We are pleased to announce a new release of the CyberGIS-Jupyter for Water (CJW) platform at https://go.illinois.edu/cybergis-jupyter-water. This release includes several new capabilities and features summarized as follows.

1) Integration of WRFHydro model with CyberGIS-Compute V2 to simplify access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) environments: A newly developed computation job template in CyberGIS-Compute enables users to configure a WRFHydro model and submit it to a HPC resource for execution. The client tool of the CyberGIS-Compute suite, CyberGIS-Compute SDK, walks users through job configuration, data transfer, job submission, and job status monitoring in a guided graphical interface. Since the overhead of HPC access is handled by CyberGIS-Compute, users can now focus on the modeling work. Currently, the implementation allows users to change almost every setting and configuration for a WRFHydro 5.x “offline run”. The whole process described above can be accomplished entirely within a notebook environment on CJW. Please refer to the example notebooks below for additional details.

2) Transition to JupyterLab: Starting with this release, CJW will launch the “next-generation notebook interface”, JupyterLab, as the default user environment. Although the new interface is different from the classic Notebook interface in many places, we anticipate this transition would be easy and smooth for most users. All existing notebooks should continue to run without modification, and the bug report and announcement UI elements have been migrated to the Lab interface. In addition, we have integrated the CUAHSI “HydroShare-on-Jupyter” extension - a handy tool that enables users to move data between CJW and HydroShare through a simple graphical user interface.

3) The “cjw” Command Line Interface (CLI): The “cjw” CLI is designed to help users manage different kernels on CJW for advanced use cases. For example, users can use this capability to set up personal kernels that will persist between sessions. For a quick start, open a terminal on CJW and try out the "cjw -h" command. Check out the documentation and examples below.

4) New Modules and Kernels: To support the latest RHESSys codebase, we have added Clang, a new C family compiler supplementing the existing GCC suite, to the CJW Easybuild-based toolbox. Accordingly, a new versioned RHESSys (2022-03) kernel has been created with Clang and other development tools pre-activated that are necessary for compilation of the RHESSys source code. Upon user requests, a new versioned WRFHydro (2022-03) kernel has been created to include the hvPlot toolset for advanced data visualization and updated versions of all the libraries from the previous WRFHydro (2021-09) kernel.

Please refer to the following resources for details and examples:
Run WRFHydro 5.x model on HPC with CyberGIS-Compute V2
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/cc28d769943046fdac0f9b0c0fc2afc6/

Implementation of WRFHydro 5.x model using CyberGIS-Compute V2
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/329ede31b88942c489aca3111b076446/

Customize Software Environment on CJW
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/461a8a853d8e42a8ae170c68c4cfa8f1/

“cjw” Command Line Interface Documentation
https://cybergis.github.io/cybergisx-cli/cjw/

See Release Notes on HydroShare
https://www.hydroshare.org/resource/b0d094eef336427ab605066e166135d3/

Please let us know if you have any questions or run into any problems (help@cybergis.org) Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards,
CyberGIS-Hydro team