We are pleased to announce SciServer’s first release, SciServer Altair. This release includes upgrades to SkyServer and CasJobs, plus new features, including SciDrive and the Login Portal.
With SciServer Altair, SkyServer and CasJobs receive major upgrades. The upgraded tools use modern web technologies and offer flexible ways to access data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
SciServer Altair introduces new features to enhance research and teaching, including the Login Portal, a single sign-on service for SciServer Tools, and SciDrive, a cloud-based webapp that enables users to upload and download files.
The next SciServer update (scheduled for the week of May 16, 2016) will add MyScratch, and will improve integration between CasJobs and SciSDrive. MyScratch is a shared, temporary scratch space that allows users to run queries with very large result sets, and temporarily save those results for later analysis. Improved integration means users can export tables from CasJobs and MyDB into SciDrive. SciDrive will simplify managing your research from beginning to end.
Over the next few months, SciServer will add SciServer Compute, an implmentation of Jupyter Notebook run analysis scripts in a Docker container, and will add new scientific datasets from fields like ecology, fluid dynamics, and genomics. With these new features, SciServer will expand the SDSS’s approach to data-intensive research and education to a growing number of scientific disciplines.