SGCI Science Gateways Landscape in North America

Award Number ACI-1547611

Sandra Gesing, Christine Kirkpatrick, Mark Leggott, Natalie Meyers, Jarek NabrzyskiThe North America Team

9th RDA Plenary Meeting

5 April 2017

The Science Gateways Landscape in North America

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Approaches to interoperability among VREs, VLs and SGs

i. Use of common standards, technologies etc. ii. How to encourage convergence on common elements of a virtual research environment (architecture/services)

Large Infrastructure Projects

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• 2004 TeraGrid project director Rick Stevens recognized growth in scientific portal development and proposed the Science Gateway Program

• Followed up by XSEDE’s Science Gateway Program

All users

Gateways

Login

Gateway users are 77% of active XSEDE users in Q4 2016

Science Gateways Community Institute - Conceptualization

What services would be helpful?2014 - Science Gateway Survey

• sent out to 29,000 persons• 4,957 responses from

across domains• 52% from life, physical or

mathematical sciences• 32% from computer and

information sciences or engineering

• 45% develop data collections• 44% develop data analysis

tools

Science Gateways Community Institute • Funded from 1 Aug 2016 –

31 Jul 2021 by NSF

• Diverse expertise on demand

• Longer term support engagements

• Software and visibility for gateways

• Information exchange in a community environment

• Student opportunities and more stable career paths

[email protected]://sciencegateways.org/

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Key ingredients

successful and vibrant virtual research communities in Americas

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Interoperability Approaches• Open source, open

standards• Hosted platforms with

customized storage, such as OSF

• Integrated Dockerized stacks, such as US National Data Service (NDS) Workbench.

• Reuse components• Market share increases

with usability

Technologies• Widely used complete frameworks (Galaxy, HubZero, Open Science

Framework etc.)

• RESTful APIs and support of multiple programming languages in widely used frameworks (Apache Airavata, the Agave platform, etc.)

• Reused interface implementations such as the one of CIPRES with its RESTful API (CIPRES has served more than 20,000 users to date)

• Science gateways as a service with provision of hardware in the background such as SciGap (Science Gateway Platform as a Service)

Lessons learned: approaches should be technology agnostic, using APIs and standard web technologies OR deliver a complete solution

Community Engagement is key

HubZero instances world wide

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Sustainability

(what are the current models that work (and conversely have failed)) in Americas

Many Successful Groups/Centers at Universities

Benefits

• Great visibility for the institution’s research activities

• Synergy between projects

• Shared resources, costs and expertise across departments

• Lower learning curves

• Expertise that is otherwise difficult for individual projects to obtain

• Ability to retain top-quality research computing support by providing interesting projects

Examples for success stories:• Center for Research

Computing at the University of Notre Dame

• HubZero Team at the Purdue University

• Science Gateways Research Center at the Indiana University

• Science Gateway Group at TACC (University of Texas, Austin)

• Leveraging Generic Platforms like OSF

Funding Bodies

Funding bodies such as NSF and NIH mention science gateways direct in solicitations and roadmaps!

https://dibbs17.org/report/Presentations/KeynoteQualters.pdf

Workshop Series GCE and conference series Gateways

• 2006: GCE (Gateway Computing Environment) workshop series started – successful 10th anniversary in 2015

• since 2013: Partnering with European IWSG (International Workshop on Science Gateways) on yearly special issue9th IWSG will take place 19-21 June 2017 in Poznań, Poland

• since 2015: Partnering with Australian IWSG-A (International Workshop on Science Gateways – Australia) on yearly special issue3rd IWSG-A will take place 16-17 October in Brisbane, Australia

• 2016: GCE extended to Gateways conference with 120 participants at the first eventGateways 2017 will take place 23–25 October 2017 in Ann Arbor, Michigan,USA

• Science Gateways Community Institutehttp://sciencegateways.org

• Gateways Conferencehttp://sciencegateways.org/gateways2017/

• XSEDE Science Gatewayshttps://www.xsede.org/gateways-overview

• CRC Science Gatewayshttps://crc.nd.edu/index.php/research/gateways

Thanks for your attention!