CCMC: AWS Cloud Computing Successes and Challenges

Since 2019, the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) has used Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing resources through the NASA Science Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE) to onboard, validate, and test space weather models. The CCMC supports the Research to Operations to Research (R2O2R) projects, in response to Presidential Executive Orders (EO) “Coordinating Efforts to Prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events” (EO 13744, 2016) and “Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulses” (EO 13865, 2019). AWS provides both technical and administrative benefits, including shared servers that enable collaboration between CCMC, research modelers, and space weather operational partners world-wide. Partnering groups can securely access software and data that is independently separated from other models. To enhance researcher and developer workflows, the CCMC has adopted AWS services such as Elastic File Systems (EFS), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), object storage (S3), EKS (Kubernetes), ECS (AWS Fargate Containers), and open source tools such as Puppet, Red Hat/CentOS Linux, AWS ParallelCluster, Terraform, Jupyterhub, and custom data management tools. This presentation will highlight examples of successful CCMC research powered by AWS, as well as challenges encountered.