HAPpy Hour- Orbiters and Clouds: Bringing Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Data to the People

Abstract- This year of open science, the USGS Branch of Astrogeology in collaboration with NASA and Amazon Web Services embarked on a high-throughput task of converting 150,000 images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to analysis ready format. This significantly lowers the barrier for scientists to engage with the imagery. The work was performed with HTCondor - a flexible, high-throughput computing platform - implemented on the Amazon cloud using a cluster-on-demand protocol developed by the team in collaboration with the USGS Water Mission Area HyTest project. This presentation will cover some details about the architecture of the high-throughput computing platform in the cloud, show results from the image processing efforts, and touch on cost aspects compared to other computing options.