Science Gateway Developers Research Articles

Development of Science Gateways Using QCG — Lessons Learned from the Deployment on Large Scale Distributed and HPC Infrastructures

Today, various Science Gateways created in close collaboration with scientific communities provide access to remote and distributed HPC, Grid and Cloud computing resources and large-scale storage facilities. However, as we have observed there are still many entry barriers for new users and various limitations for active scientists. In this paper we present our latest achievements and software solutions that significantly simplify the use of large scale and distributed computing. We describe several Science Gateways that have been successfully created with the help of our application tools and the QCG (Quality in Cloud and Grid) middleware, in particular Vine Toolkit, QCG-Portal and QCG-Now, and make the use of HPC, Grid and Cloud more straightforward and transparent. Additionally, we share the best practices and lessons learned after creating jointly with user communities many domain-specific Science Gateways, e.g. dedicated for physicists, medical scientists, chemists, engineers and external communities performing multi-scale simulations. As our deployed software solutions have reached recently a critical mass of active users in the PLGrid e-infrastructure in Poland, we also discuss in this paper how changing technologies, visual design and user experience could impact the way we should re-design Science Getaways or even develop new attractive tools, e.g. desktop or mobile-based applications in the future. Finally, we present information and statistics regarding the behaviour of users to help readers understand how new capabilities and functionalities may influence the growth of user interest in Science Gateways and HPC technologies.

The Globus Galaxies platform: delivering science gateways as a service

SummaryThe use of public cloud computers to host sophisticated scientific data and software is transforming scientific practice by enabling broad access to capabilities previously available only to the few. The primary obstacle to more widespread use of public clouds to host scientific software (‘cloud‐based science gateways’) has thus far been the considerable gap between the specialized needs of science applications and the capabilities provided by cloud infrastructures. We describe here a domain‐independent, cloud‐based science gateway platform, the Globus Galaxies platform, which overcomes this gap by providing a set of hosted services that directly address the needs of science gateway developers. The design and implementation of this platform leverages our several years of experience with Globus Genomics, a cloud‐based science gateway that has served more than 200 genomics researchers across 30 institutions. Building on that foundation, we have implemented a platform that leverages the popular Galaxy system for application hosting and workflow execution; Globus services for data transfer, user and group management, and authentication; and a cost‐aware elastic provisioning model specialized for public cloud resources. We describe here the capabilities and architecture of this platform, present six scientific domains in which we have successfully applied it, report on user experiences, and analyze the economics of our deployments. Published 2015. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

Recipes 2.0: building for today and tomorrow

SummaryThe history of science gateway development has, in many ways, been a story of the ‘Haves’ vs. the ‘Have‐nots’. Large infrastructure projects led the way, building thick client portals to provide coherent interfaces to an incoherent environment. Contrast this with the way the modern Web is designed using light, front end components, and outsourcing much of the heavy lifting to a mash‐up of REST application programming interfaces, and it is easy to see why modern web applications can be prototyped and refined into stable products in the time it previously took thick client portals to do an initial release. This paper argues that a ‘build for today’ philosophy can lead to the rapid development of science gateways to serve the ‘Have‐nots’. With this philosophy in mind, we are presenting Gateway DNA, a set of responsive front end components built on top of the iPlant Agave application programming interfaces. This toolkit provides the boilerplate for rapid development of lightweight science gateways using only HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Using Gateway DNA, developers can easily stand up new gateways or quickly add new functionality to existing ones. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Experiences of the Brazilian national high‐performance computing network on the rapid prototyping of science gateways

SummaryArguably, an important amount of scientific software development time is likely to be employed on user interfaces. In particular, science gateways have gained increasing interest from the e‐Science community. These gateways allow hiding the complexity of the underlying resources that give support to the management of scientific data and to the execution of scientific applications. Based on our previous experience with the development of science gateways for diverse application domains in the Brazilian national high‐performance computing network (SINAPAD), we have devised a rapid prototyping strategy to lower the barrier for scientific application developers to launch new science gateways. This strategy is based on two main tools. The first tool implements a gateway engine that can be configured by a small set of XML files. Such files completely define the desired functionality of a specific science gateway in the gateway engine. The gateway engine also offers other features not commonly found in related technologies, such as file sharing, data provenance tracking, and restricted anonymous access to underlying computational resources. The second tool implements both an editor and a packager for the aforementioned engine. This tool allows the developer to rapidly deploy and launch a new science gateway in ordinary Web application containers. In this paper, we present our results with the use of both tools in the SINAPAD network. We also discuss about the current limitations of both tools, as well as how we have been dealing with such limitations to provide a more comprehensive toolset to developers. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Quakesim portal and services: new approaches to science gateway development techniques

Traditional techniques in building science portals and gateways are being challenged by new techniques such as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. This paper discusses some of our efforts to evaluate thes...

The Quakesim portal and services: new approaches to science gateway development techniques

AbstractTraditional techniques in building science portals and gateways are being challenged by new techniques such as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. This paper discusses some of our efforts to evaluate these techniques as we evolve the QuakeSim architecture. We believe that architecturally both traditional and newer approaches for Gateways are very similar; thus, giving us a path for moving to hybrid approaches. In this paper, we specifically evaluate techniques for building interactive user interfaces that rely on remote services; architectural approaches for managing massive job submissions that can include both parallel and serial jobs; and an architectural prototype for building component‐based containers compatible with emerging standards. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.