GW Tools & Infrastructure Enabling Open Source

Github Enterprise for Education

GWIT is able to offer GitHub Enterprise through Microsoft's Github Enterprise for Education program. This cloud based service is available to all of GW's students, faculty, and staff. This service allows for eligible members of the GW community a place to store git repositories remotely to ease collaboration with other members of the GW community as well as take advantage of a substantial (but not unlimited !) pool of cloud hosted resources.

GitHub is a very large platform with frequent additions and changes to features. To claim that all of the expertise lies within GWIT would be a lie to the GWCommunity. What GWIT can commit to is to support this platform and its users, keeping abreast of changes as announced, and learning with you as our community's adoption of GitHub exposes our community's needs.

With that stated, here are a couple of basic instructions and links to get started:

  • To join GW's GitHub Enterprise you'll need to create a personal GitHub account. Once you've created your personal account, head to GW's GitHub Enterprise and create an issue in the GWUniversity-SelfInvite repository to invite yourself.
  • You'll be able to create Teams within the GWUniversity organization that consist of other registered users. To allow members outside of GW to contribute, you'll need to invite them to specific repositories as an outside contributor.
    • GW's flagship HPC cluster is Pegasus, a 200+ node shared system supporting a broad array of supercomputing and data intensive workloads
    • The Raptor cluster is a test cluster available to all Pegasus users. In order to provide greater availability for computational resources, whenever possible, Raptor and Pegasus will not have common maintenance windows.
    • The Cerberus cluster supports teaching HPC in the classroom.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot (formerly known as Bing Chat) is an artificial intelligence (AI) powered chat assistant designed to enhance productivity, creativity, and data accessibility. It can answer both simple and complex queries, assist with research, and provide summaries of various content such as articles, books, or events. It can also offer product comparisons, find comprehensive answers, provide inspiration, generate images, and much more. 

Please ensure you are logged into Microsoft Copilot with your UserID and password to enable data security and privacy features. GW IT does not monitor or have access to your Microsoft Copilot sessions. Microsoft will not use your data to train artificial intelligence models or retain chat history when signed in with your GW identity. However, it is still important to take the following precautionary steps to protect your data:

  • Login with your GW identity for data security and privacy 
  • Avoid sharing sensitive information and limit your queries to GW’s public data classification level
  • Check the Copilot responses for errors, accuracy, and verify any factual information

Jupyterhub

JupyterHub brings the power of notebooks to groups of users. It gives users access to computational environments and resources without burdening the users with installation and maintenance tasks. Users - including students, researchers, and data scientists - can get their work done in their own workspaces on shared resources which can be managed efficiently by system administrators.

GW has a jupyterhub instance that can be used by anyone at GW to run computational notebooks for a class or for individuals.  If you don't have a login then please contact [email protected] and request access.

OSF

The Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free, open source tool created and hosted by the Center for Open Science. Designed to meet immediate needs like file sharing, collaboration, and project management, the OSF contains additional features that become useful for the later phases in research such as preparing for publication or grant renewal. Flexible private/public settings allow researchers to share their work selectively and even receive Digital Object Identifiers, for persistent citation, without needing to leave the platform. By integrating with tools that researchers already use (e.g. Google Drive, Box, GitHub, and Zotero), the OSF does not require users to learn a whole new system or to change successful workflows. Through the “registration” feature, the OSF can help decrease some of the compliance burden by creating a timestamped version of the workspace for active research, which then serves as a preservation and access mechanism for projects.

DMPTool

Through GWU's relationship with DMPTool, access guidance to help prepare data management plans (DMP) and customized information that includes:

  • Guiding questions to consider to fulfill requirements for each part of your plan
  • Templates for DMPs tailored to specific sponsors
  • Links to GW contacts, resources, and services for assistance with research planning

You can sign into GW DMPTool in 3 simple steps:

  • Step 1: Click "Log In" or "Get Started"
  • Step 2: Select "Option 1" sign in with your institution and lookup George Washington University or GWU
  • Step 3: Log in with your GW UserID and Password

You will be directed to "My Dashboard" where you can begin creating or reviewing your DMPs.

Caaren

The Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN) is an initiative designed to build a high-performance research and education infrastructure serving the Washington, DC, and Northern Virginia areas. As the capital area's Internet2 member network, CAAREN facilitates world-class research, education, and knowledge sharing in the nation’s capital.

Globus

Globus provides a secure, unified interface to your research data. Use Globus to 'fire and forget' high-performance data transfers between systems within and across organizations.

Globus lets you use a web browser or command line interface to submit transfer and synchronization requests, with the option for encryption. You can also schedule the transfer or set up a flow to automate the data transfer.

High Performance Computing

For research that relies on high-performance computing (HPC) for data analysis and supercomputing applications, GW has implemented multiple systems.