NASA Center for Climate Simulation

Summer Internships at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s CISTO Office Reflect the Mission of the NASA Year of Open Science

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) sent a press release in January 2023 announcing the official launch of the Year of Open Science across the federal government, with specific goals and actions involving the planned adoption of this initiative by several major federal agencies, including NASA. OSTP reported that the initiative will “advance open and equitable research, including new grant funding, improvements in research infrastructure, broadened research participation for emerging scholars, and expanded opportunities for public engagement.”

Also in January 2023, NASA announced the launch of the agency’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission, an initiative designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations, and communities to an inclusive culture of open science. TOPS is part of NASA’s Open-Source Science Initiative. The TOPS mission will allow the agency to create a scientific culture that is ready for 21st century challenges.

As an example of how NASA is helping fulfill both the OSTP’s Year of Open Science goals and NASA’s TOPS mission by “broadening research participation for emerging scholars,” we are highlighting ten students – two high school students, seven undergraduate students, and one graduate student – working as NASA interns across several groups at the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in summer 2023. These scholars are working with NASA open science data on open platforms.

CISTO’s High-Performance Computing Group manages and operates the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), one of the world's most powerful supercomputer and data storage centers. NCCS provides state-of-the-art supercomputing and data services for research, serving a user community based at NASA centers and laboratories and universities across the country and internationally. Within CISTO’s NCCS, two students, Bianca Ortega and Lucas Snyder, are working on projects ranging from discovering binary stars in TESS light curve data using machine learning to benchmarking specific science use cases on NASA’s Discover supercomputer.

CISTO’s Data Science Group (DSG) performs strategic planning to prioritize information technology advances needed to enable science investigations and missions. Three interns are working in the DSG this summer: Henry Bae, Deon Kouatchou-Ngongang, and Aarav Khanna. Their respective projects involve working on Earth system models using machine learning, regression testing, and data visualization tools.

CISTO’s Science-Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE) Group provides a low-barrier, fast-access, cloud-based environment empowering researchers to create their own offering for open collaboration, open access to methods and data, as well as rapid prototyping. Five interns are working in the SMCE Group this summer: Sela Alonso, Dennis Du, Katie Li, Isa Nawaz, and Rodrigo Villamil. Their diverse projects include developing weather research and forecasting model services; processing satellite data of ocean topography; training a deep-learning global weather forecasting model; researching and testing an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbox and smart assistants for integration into Jupyter and DaskHub; customizing content management systems; and testing the use of a free and open-source, distributed version control system (Git) using an agile management approach.

As a first this summer, the SMCE Group removed barriers to access for CISTO summer interns while making the internship ramp-up process faster and easier. Interns were provided with cloud-based resources that are quick and flexible to configure and access, Jupyter notebooks, and HPC parallel clusters.

CISTO Chief and SMCE Government Manager Dan Duffy explained, “Since NASA interns have such a short time to spend with their mentors, we asked ourselves how we could optimize their productivity while teaching open science. A true transformation to open science requires quick and easy access to both compute and data resources.”

The solution? “The Science Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE) using commercial Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the ideal place to accelerate CISTO summer interns’ research,” Duffy said. “Using Jupyter notebooks, large data sets, and parallel clusters, our interns have taken on a diverse set of research projects, including everything from building a Python front-end framework to run the NASA Unified Weather Research Forecast (NU-WRF) model in the cloud to analyzing machine learning predictions for weather using high-resolution NASA reanalysis data.”

Building and providing the SMCE to researchers, including interns, directly addresses three of the primary goals of the Year of Open Science: to advance open and equitable research; improve research infrastructure; and provide open science research participation for emerging scholars.

Learn more about each of these summer interns and their respective projects by clicking on the buttons below.

► Sela Alonso ► Henry Bae ► Dennis Du ► Aarav Khanna ► Deon Kouatchou-Ngongang ► Katie Li ► Isa Nawaz ► Bianca Ortega ► Lucas Snyder ► Rodrigo Villamil

Related Links

• NASA’s Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS)
• NASA’s Science-Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE)
• NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission
• Gentemann, C., 2023. Why NASA and Federal Agencies are Declaring This the Year of Open Science. Nature, 613, 7943, doi: 10.1038/d41586-023-00019-y.

Sean Keefe, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
July 14, 2023