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.

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 to 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.

Science Platform

The CANFAR Science Platform is a container-based science platform that is accessible directly 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.

For user instructions, see the online documentation or doc/README.md in the source distribution.

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.

Cloud Services

CANFAR gives access to the OpenStack cloud. Users can create and configure virtual machines (VMs), which can either be used interactively, or snap-shotted to be run in batch mode, and manage isolated data volumes. A quick start guide is available, as well as full documentation.

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.