CIROH research requires substantial and diverse computational capabilities, and need that requires research to
investigate the most effective computing infrastructure for a variety of research applications. To do so, CIROH’s
cyberinfrastructure team has established a consortium-wide Research Cloud including cloud resources, high-
performance computing (HPC) resources, and storage capabilities. Research from CIROH explores and identifies
the most useful Cloud and HPC resources, develops and documents them to support CIROH computing, and creates
materials and support processes for training the community on the effective use of the resources. To meet the size
and scope of NextGen, FIM and the importance of its purpose for NOAA, CIROH Cyberinfrastructure provides a
flexible, scalable and secure infrastructure for researchers, enabling research projects with a far-reaching impact
across all CIROH research activities.
The CIROH Cyberinfrastructure, also known as the Research to Operations Hybrid Cloud (R2OHC) Platform, is a
unified, multi-cloud hybrid ecosystem that integrates public clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), managed services
(via 2i2c JupyterHub deployed on Google Cloud), NSF ACCESS allocations, and on-premises high-performance
computing (HPC). It is designed to provide accessible, scalable, and secure computational resources for over 500+
researchers across 28+ academic institutions, transforming hydrological modeling through cloud-native approaches.
Modern DevOps practices and open-source technologies allow R2OHC to deliver speed, quality, and continuous
improvement. Key innovations such as automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines,
containerized workflows, pre-configured environments, and an ecosystem built on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) have
reduced model setup time, enabling researchers to focus on science rather than technical configuration challenges.
The infrastructure supports a community of 500+ users and 104 CIROH projects, which has enabled numerous peer-reviewed publications,
presentations, and trainings. The CIROH-UA GitHub organization currently hosts 50+ public repositories advancing
water resources research with 100+ contributors and 8,060+ commits.
CIROH’s standard of practice (SOP) document v1.1 https://hub.ciroh.org/docs/policies/CyberinfrastructurePolicy/
sop/ shared with members and partners provides standard operating procedures that governs the process of
administering CIROH Cyberinfrastructure’s cloud and on-premises resources.