2023 DeSouza Award

Jeremy Fisher, Indiana University
Andrea Zonca, San Diego Supercomputing Center

The Russell L. DeSouza Award honors “individuals whose energy, expertise, and active involvement enable the Unidata Program to better serve the geosciences.”

The 2023 Russell L. DeSouza Award is a little different in that it honors two individuals from different institutions who have been supporting the Unidata community in very similar ways. Andrea Zonca from the San Diego Supercomputing Center and Jeremy Fischer from Indiana University have both been vital contributors to Unidata’s Science Gateway project through — among many other things! — their work in porting the Zero to JupyterHub with Kubernetes project to the NSF Jetstream Cloud.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, Unidata pivoted to using Science Gateway resources to deploy JupyterHub servers in support of remote learning experiences for university students. Jupyter and JupyterHub technologies allow users to access pre-configured, interactive notebooks for instructional purposes. In partnership with university professors and educators, Unidata equips these servers with pre-configured PyAOS (Python for the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences) environments. Since the spring of 2020, Unidata has provided access to these scientific computing resources to close to 1400 students at 19 universities.

These achievements were made possible by the efforts of Andrea who forked the main Zero to JupyterHub project and reconfigured it with the help of Jeremy to run on Jetstream. At the same time, Jeremy has supported a wide variety of other Unidata resources running on the Jetstream platform, from a publicly-accessible “cloud EDEX” server to THREDDS and RAMADDA servers used in a variety of contexts. Both Andrea and Jeremy provided the Unidata community with their extensive expertise at the hardware, operating system, and software levels to ensure these servers run smoothly. When problems do arise, as they inevitably do, Andrea and Jeremy have quickly intervened to resolve issues or provide workarounds. Taken together, these activities have had an enormous impact on Unidata’s community of students and researchers by making Jetstream resources available in ways that are truly useful.

A video recording of the award presentation and Jeremy and Andrea's seminar is linked below and is available on the NSF Unidata YouTube Channel. Their presentation slides are also available.

Questions About the Desouza Award?

Questions or comments about the Desouza Award can be sent to: support@unidata.ucar.edu