DevCon 2025: Hydroinformatics and Research CyberInfrastructure Keynote
Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to co-present a keynote at the CIROH Developers Conference (DevCon 2025), which attracted over 200 attendees. This presentation, which I presented alongside Dan Ames, focused on "CIROH HydroInformatics and Research Cyberinfrastructure." It was a fantastic experience to share insights into the powerful tools and technologies that CIROH engineers, students, researchers have been developing to advance hydrological research and operations.
Our keynote aimed to showcase the comprehensive ecosystem that CIROH offers. We highlighted four key pillars:
- Computing Resources: CIROH offers accress to public cloud infrastructure, on-premises HPC, and NSF ACCESS resources.
- Data Management: CIROH members handle and share vast datasets crucial for hydrological modeling. We've provided platforms to do so through HydroShare and CIROH AWS S3 buckets, as well as streamlining access and analysis of this data through tools like Google BigQuery API and Tethys Platform.
- Model Development: CIROH develops tools and frameworks for developing and refining hydrological models, including the NGIAB ecosystem.
- Knowledge Sharing: CIROH disseminates findings and best practices through the DocuHub and Portal platforms.
Value and Impact
During the keynote, we emphasized the value that CIROH brings to new students and researchers. This includes access to:
- Computational resources that would normally cost thousands of dollars.
- Datasets that would take months to compile.
- Tools that streamline research and increase its impact.
We also highlighted several key tools within the CIROH ecosystem that are pushing hydrology forward:
- NGIAB (NextGen In A Box) ecosystem: Provides power and portability to the NextGen water modeling framework through leading open-source software development.
- CIROH's DocuHub: A central repository for documentation, as well as a platform for monthly blog and news updates.
- CIROH Portal: Facilitates to data, tools, and research findings.
- Google BigQuery NWM API: An efficient alternative for accessing and querying National Water Model data.
- Tethys Platform: Empowers intuitive, accessible web applications to deliver data and model results.
- Pantarhei and Wukong HPC: CIROH's high-performance computing cluster for demanding computations.
- And many more!
Our overall message was that CIROH’s hydroinformatics and research cyberinfrastructure ecosystem is designed to support and amplify research efforts. We encouraged attendees to explore these resources and consider how they could be applied to their own work. Whether it's streamlining data workflows, tackling computationally intensive tasks, or sharing findings, CIROH provides the tools and infrastructure to push the boundaries of hydrological science.
We want to thank everyone who attended our keynote and engaged in the Mentimeter quiz. It’s an exciting time for hydroinformatics, and we’re thrilled to be a part of this dynamic community!
Video voiced by Quinn Lee and prepared by Manjila Singh, Nia Minor, and Arpita Patel.
