My colleagues and I are thrilled to announce the latest release of our SciServer online science platform.

SciServer a suite of tools to manage, visualize, and understand large-scale datasets in all areas of science, from astronomy to genomics to soil ecology. SciServer allows anyone to work with Terabytes of data, running server-side analysis and visualization tools in real time, without needed to install anything.

The beating heart of SciServer is SciServer Compute, a browser-based virtual computing environment. Anyone can create a free SciServer account and create analysis scripts in Python, R, or Matlab.

Today’s release is called SciServer Betelgeuse, succeeding the previous system SciServer Altair (#lolSeeWhatWeDidThere). SciServer Betelgeuse adds group functionality for file and data sharing, and also the ability to run asynchronous time- or memory-intensive jobs. We’ve been working on this update for more than two years, and we’re eager to see how everyone can make use of it.

We’re grateful to the generosity of the National Science Foundation (award ACI-1261715) for their generosity in allowing us to create and maintain this resource, forever free to users.

The “we” I keep referring to here is a team of incredibly talented scientists and coders at the Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) at Johns Hopkins University. I’m honored to have been part of this team for the past eighteen years.

And on a personal note, this new release is a major new step in my career. I’ve devoted my entire professional life to finding new ways to bring the real process of science to the world, and this is the realest real way yet.