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polar-computing / CWP

Community White Paper
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offline - Siewart #4

Open shantenujha opened 4 years ago

shantenujha commented 4 years ago

First off, I am working on soil organic carbon and plant productivity mapping in the Arctic using Drones, high-res and low-res satellites mainly using multispectral bands and derivatives (e.g. land cover, NDVI, DEM). Last year, I had access to use the Swedish HPDC network, but in the end went back to have my desktop run stuff for 2-3 days. The main reason was license restrictions for the UAV software, lack of sudo access (to install docker, to install opendronemap as an alternative), and for circumpolar datasets, I found the lack of rstudio server and ssh -X forwarding very annoying. So without an ultimate need, I didn't use the service.

The one aspect I find missing in your article, is the use of Googles Earth engine and the worrisome reliance of more and more research groups on it. It seems to be a good service, I have tried it and it is very powerful. However, I think researchers risk to fall in the same vendor lock-in trap as with software licenses. Further, there is a true risk, that google may phase out the service at some point making the science based on it non-repeatable and destroying the effort of written scripts and produced data.

It would be fantastic to work with the FOSS community and HPDC personnel on earth engine like replacement using FOSS tools (GRASS, QGIS) and languages (R, Python). This is probably something that would have to come from the data users (e.g. polar scientists), as the FOSS community will be limited to encourage this. It would be a fairly big effort. But in my opinion, maybe the best way to really have polar scientists use the opportunities of HPDC. After all, thats exactly how google solved it.

Maybe you can implement some of these thoughts in the article. Feel free to contact me on this.

allenpope commented 4 years ago

Added this sentence: "Google Earth Engine, while freely available for now, may be licensed, closed, or sunsetted (already, the evolving platform deprecates functions and can require updates to code to ensure scripts continue running) in the future, which would be a significant problem for users in terms of future productivity and reproducibility."