The USD Science Gateway

Abstract

Science Gateways are virtual environments that accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientific communities to more easily and effectively utilize distributed computing and data resources. Successful Science Gateways provide access to sophisticated and powerful resources, while shielding their users from the underlying complexities. Here we present updated work completed by the University of South Dakota (USD) Research Computing Group in conjunction with the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) [1] and Science Gateways Research Center at Indiana University to set up a Science Gateway to access USD's high-performance computing resources. We also introduce improvements to the system since the previous presentation of our work. These resources are now available to both faculty and students and allow ease of access and use of USD's distributed computing and data resources. The implementation of this gateway project has been multifaceted and has included placement of federated user login, user facilitation and outreach, and integration of USD's cyberinfrastructure resources. We present this project as an example for other research computing groups so that they may learn from our successes and the challenges that we have overcome in providing this user resource. Additionally, this project serves to exemplify the importance of creating a broad user base of research computing infrastructure through the development of alternative user interfaces such as Science Gateways.