OpenCosmo: Community Portal and Analysis Framework for Flagship Cosmological Simulations

Cosmology is an observational precision science, and detailed and scientifically rich simulations are necessary components of many analyses. These simulations are often computationally expensive and produce massive amounts of complex data. Sharing that data widely to enable further explorations, comparison with observations, and communication with general audiences is crucial to advancing the scientific frontier and engaging a broader community. In this paper, we introduce the OpenCosmo project, designed to provide flexible access and analysis modes to large cosmological simulation datasets. We make available an easy-to-use web-based data portal for retrieving downloadable subsets of flagship-scale cosmological datasets, and a sophisticated analysis library for further analysis on the returned data. OpenCosmo supports multiple levels of interaction -- from simple search and download to interactive exploration and computation -- by integrating with existing HPC and data infrastructure. Its architecture, based on Globus Compute, provides a scalable and adaptable framework that can be extended to other scientific domains seeking to couple data sharing with computational capability.