Community Cloud Computing Infrastructure to Support Equitable Water Research and Education

Abstract

Introduction Recent advancements and investment in cyberinfrastructure (CI) have changed how water science research and education are conducted, in part, by establishing free and open source cloud solutions that enable sharing, publishing, and executing scientific workflows. Cloud computing has become ubiquitous within the field of water science and engineering and is quickly becoming an essential tool for both higher education and scientific research. Such tools and frameworks have had a transformative impact on our collective ability to address modern science and education challenges, such as those associated with large-scale interdisciplinary collaboration, scientific reuse, and engineering education. While cloud technologies have been leveraged extensively within the physical sciences, there exist challenges around the privacy, accessibility, and ethics of the capabilities being developed, as well as technological disconnects between academic research and the broader audience of stakeholders and decision makers that they serve (Makropoulos and Savić 2019).