Preliminary IGC9 AWS workshop plan (e.g. gather user feedbacks)

[JiaweiZhuang]

I will be leading an AWS workshop on the 9th International GEOS-Chem Meeting. The workshop will be on May 9th, Thursday, 3pm-5pm (2-hour long). Nick Ragusa, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS Boston office, will help organize the workshop. He will create 40~50 AWS accounts for temporary use during the workshop.

I am planning to cover the following parts:

• Basic EC2, AMI, Jupyter usage as in Quick start guide. This should take 30~60 minutes for a first-time user.
• Configuring AWSCLI and retrieving data from S3. This should take another 30~60 minutes.
• Experienced user can try building a custom model version or using containers. I don't expect many people to reach this stage.

Things to double-check before the workshop:

1. Review the tutorial to make sure it is not broken. Particularly check AMI id, shell commands, screenshots. @GCST -- please help review it if you have time.
2. Ensure that the temporary AWS accounts have proper AWSCLI access. I assume that we will have Access Key Id and Secret Access Key already created, so users can just configure AWSCLI, skipping the step of generating credentials.

I also want to gather feedbacks as in #15. People should post their feedbacks under a GitHub issue. This seems a very effective way of getting visible outcomes from the workshop. We can then reference those public user comments in papers/blog-posts/funding-proposals.

The workshop participants will need to sign-up for GitHub accounts (ideally before workshop), to post comments on the GitHub issue tracker (and star GEOS-Chem repositories🙂). After finishing the workshop, they will post feedbacks including:

1. Time to finish the basic EC2 tutorial.
2. Time to finish the basic S3 tutorial.
3. General comments, if any. (e.g. unclear documentations)
4. Are you planning to use cloud computing for your research? If not, what's your concern (e.g. cost, funding, docs, learning curve, already have compute resources, etc)? From this twitter thread, the lack of docs seems a big thing.

Please leave any comments on this workshop plan under this issue. I will open another issue to gather actual workshop feedbacks.

[JiaweiZhuang]

Users also are highly encouraged to get familiar with Python/Jupyter/Xarray before attending the workshop. Spending 30~60min studying https://github.com/geoschem/GEOSChem-python-tutorial should be enough. I probably won't have a dedicated time slot for teaching Python. Frankly, they can use GEOS-Chem on AWS without knowing Python (just skip the data analysis), but that makes the learning quite boring as they won't see any pretty figures. Also, AWSCLI depends on Python environment.