Overview

The Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomy Research (CANFAR) is a consortium that serves computing and data intensive needs of university groups and centres engaged in astronomy research.

Science Portal

The CANFAR Science Portal gives access to a container-based science platform from the browser. The platform allows users to launch both pre-built and custom computing environments for their scientific analysis which run on the compute servers, next to the large data sets. It provides a browser-based remote desktop environment, Jupyter notebooks, the CARTA data visualization tool, and users can contribute web frameworks to interact with the same data.

Storage Management

VOSpace is the CANFAR storage system, an implementation of the Virtual Observatory Specification. It is used for storing and sharing files between members of a collaboration, or to publish data for the community. Users are able to view, manage, and transfer files and folders using either the web interface or the command line, with the vos python package.

Cloud Services

CANFAR gives access to an OpenStack cloud hosted by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Users can create and configure virtual machines (VMs), which can either be used interactively, or in batch mode, and manage isolated data volumes. An introduction is available and describes CANFAR specific extensions through an example, as well as a full documentation of the Digital Alliance cloud offerings.

Data Publication

The purpose of the Data Publication Service (DPS) is to support linking a research paper to the actual data that were used to produce the conclusions of that paper. The DPS provides storage space and the ability to register (publish) a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) with the DataCite system. That DOI will point to the published data on a permanent basis.

Group Management

The Group Management system provides the ability to control the access to software containers and VOSpace datasets. Access can limited to the group owner, shared with a groups of users, or made fully public.