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Scientific data, its analysis, accuracy, completeness, and reproducibility play a vital role in advancing science and engineering. Open Science Chain (OSC) is a cyberinfrastructure platform built using the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) blockchain technology to address issues related to data reproducibility and accountability in scientific research. OSC preserves the integrity of research datasets and enables different research groups to share datasets with the integrity information. Additionally, it enables quick verification of the exact datasets that were used for a particular published research and tracks its provenance. In this paper, we describe OSC’s command line utility that will preserve the integrity of research datasets from within the researchers’ environment or from remote systems such as HPC resources or campus clusters used for research. The Python-based command line utility can be seamlessly integrated within research workflows and provides an easy way to preserve the integrity of research data in OSC blockchain platform. 

A User Portal is being developed for NSF-funded Expanse super- computer. The Expanse portal is based on the NSF-funded Open OnDemand HPC portal platform which has gained widespread adoption at HPC centers. The portal will provide a gateway for launching interactive applications such as MATLAB, RStudio, and an integrated web-based environment for file management and job submission. This paper discusses the early experience in deploying the portal and the customizations that were made to accommodate the requirements of the Expanse user community. 

Scientific data, along with its analysis, accuracy, completeness, and reproducibility, plays a vital role in advancing science and engineering. Open Science Chain (OSC) provides a Cyberinfrastructure platform, built using distributed ledger technologies, where verification information about scientific dataset is stored and managed in a consortium blockchain. Researchers have the ability to independently verify the authenticity of scientific results using the information stored with OSC. Researchers can also build research workflows by linking data entries in the ledger and external repositories such as GitHub that will allow for detailed provenance tracking. OSC enables answers to questions such as: how can we ensure research integrity when different research groups share and work on the same datasets across the world? Is it possible to enable quick verification of the exact data sets that were used for particular published research? Can we check the provenance of the data used in the research? In this poster, we highlight our work in building a secure, scalable architecture for OSC including developing a security module for storing identities that can be used by the researchers of science gateways communities to increase the confidence of their scientific results. 

We describe the design motivation, architecture, deployment, and early operations of Expanse, a 5 Petaflop, heterogenous HPC system that entered production as an NSF-funded resource in December 2020 and will be operated on behalf of the national community for five years. Expanse will serve a broad range of computational science and engineering through a combination of standard batch-oriented services, and by extending the system to the broader CI ecosystem through science gateways, public cloud integration, support for high throughput computing, and composable systems. Expanse was procured, deployed, and put into production entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, adhering to stringent public health guidelines throughout. Nevertheless, the planned production date of October 1, 2020 slipped by only two months, thanks to thorough planning, a dedicated team of technical and administrative experts, collaborative vendor partnerships, and a commitment to getting an important national computing resource to the community at a time of great need. 

Data sharing is an integral component of research and academic publications, allowing for independent verification of results. Researchers have the ability to extend and build upon prior research when they are able to efficiently access, validate, and verify the data referenced in publications. Despite the well known benefits of making research data more open, data withholding rates have remained constant. Some disincentives to sharing research data include lack of credit, and fear of misrepresentation of data in the absence of context and provenance. While there are several research data sharing repositories that focus on making research data available, there are no cyberinfrastructure platforms that enable researchers to efficiently validate the authenticity of datasets, track the provenance, view the lineage of the data and verify ownership information. In this paper, we introduce and provide an overview of the NSF funded Open Science Chain, a cyberinfrastructure platform built using blockchain technologies that securely stores metadata and verification information about research data and tracks changes to that data in an auditable manner in order to address issues related to reproducibility and accountability in scientific research.