What is the Fornax Science Console?

The Fornax Science Console (ForSC) is a NASA-funded web-based application that provides access to a limited amount of cloud computing via JupyterLab, which offers access to Jupyter Notebooks, Jupyter Console, and the terminal (command line). Users must register to login to the system, but usage is free. Once logged in, users will have access to data sets curated by repositories around the world, and can upload moderate amounts of private data. To get started quickly, users can choose from a variety of example Jupyter notebooks as well as pre-installed software environments. These can be modified to suit user needs.

The Fornax Science Console supports many astronomical use cases, but users will find it especially beneficial for analyses:

• on large cloud-hosted data sets that would be cumbersome to download;
• that require complicated software pre-installed on the platform; or
• that are parallelizable and require a large number of CPUs.