Science Gateway Research Articles

Open OnDemand: State of the platform, project, and the future

SummaryHigh performance computing (HPC) has led to remarkable advances in science and engineering and has become an indispensable tool for research. Unfortunately, HPC use and adoption by many researchers is often hindered by the complex way these resources are accessed. Indeed, while the web has become the dominant access mechanism for remote computing services in virtually every computing area, HPC is a notable exception. Open OnDemand is an open source project negating this trend by providing web‐based access to HPC resources ( https://openondemand.org). This article describes the challenges to adoption and other lessons learned over the 3‐year project that may be relevant to other science gateway projects. We end with a description of future plans the project team has during the Open OnDemand 2.0 project including specific developments in machine learning and GPU monitoring.

Measuring success for a future vision: Defining impact in science gateways/virtual research environments

SummaryScholars worldwide leverage science gateways/virtual research environments (VREs) for a wide variety of research and education endeavors spanning diverse scientific fields. Evaluating the value of a given science gateway/VRE to its constituent community is critical in obtaining the financial and human resources necessary to sustain operations and increase adoption in the user community. In this article, we feature a variety of exemplar science gateways/VREs and detail how they define impact in terms of, for example, their purpose, operation principles, and size of user base. Further, the exemplars recognize that their science gateways/VREs will continuously evolve with technological advancements and standards in cloud computing platforms, web service architectures, data management tools and cybersecurity. Correspondingly, we present a number of technology advances that could be incorporated in next‐generation science gateways/VREs to enhance their scope and scale of their operations for greater success/impact. The exemplars are selected from owners of science gateways in the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) clientele in the United States, and from the owners of VREs in the International Virtual Research Environment Interest Group (VRE‐IG) of the Research Data Alliance. Thus, community‐driven best practices and technology advances are compiled from diverse expert groups with an international perspective to envisage futuristic science gateway/VRE innovations.

Cloud apps to‐go: Cloud portability with TOSCA and MiCADO

SummaryAs cloud adoption increases, so do the number of available cloud service providers. Moving complex applications between clouds can be beneficial—or other times necessary—but achieving this so‐called cloud portability is rarely straightforward. This article presents the adoption of OASIS TOSCA, a standard in the declarative description of cloud applications, to encourage and facilitate cloud portability in MiCADO, an application‐level multi‐cloud orchestration and auto‐scaling framework. The interface to MiCADO is an Application Description Template, which draws from the TOSCA specification to describe an application in MiCADO. The generic design of these templates is presented and their applicability for achieving portability between different container and cloud environments is analysed and evaluated. A proof‐of‐concept where MiCADO serves as the deployment and execution engine for a Science Gateway in Sleep Healthcare is then described. In this proof‐of‐concept, MiCADO facilitates the deployment of a complex healthcare application, which is then moved from one cloud service provider to another with only minimal changes to the template which originally described it. This TOSCA‐based approach to templates in MiCADO encourages movement between clouds by making cloud portability more approachable.

Tapis v3 Streams API: Time‐series and data‐driven event support in science gateway infrastructure

SummaryThe explosion of IoT devices and sensors in recent years has led to a demand for efficiently storing, processing and analyzing time‐series data. Geoscience researchers use time‐series data stores such as Hydroserver, Virtual Observatory and Ecological Informatics System (VOEIS), and Cloud‐Hosted Real‐time Data Service (CHORDS). Many of these tools require a great deal of infrastructure to deploy and expertise to manage and scale. The Tapis framework, an NSF funded project, provides science as a service APIs to allow researchers to achieve faster scientific results, by eliminating the need to set up a complex infrastructure stack. The University of Hawai'i (UH) and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have collaborated to develop an open source Tapis Streams API that builds on the concepts of the CHORDS time series data service to support research. This new hosted service allows storing, processing, annotating, archiving, and querying time‐series data in the Tapis multi‐user and multi‐tenant collaborative platform. The Streams API provides a hosted production level middleware service that enables new data‐driven event workflows capabilities that may be leveraged by researchers and Tapis powered science gateways for handling spatially indexed time‐series datasets.

Recommender-as-a-Service with Chatbot Guided Domain-science Knowledge Discovery in a Science Gateway.

Scientists in disciplines such as neuroscience and bioinformatics are increasingly relying on science gateways for experimentation on voluminous data, as well as analysis and visualization in multiple perspectives. Though current science gateways provide easy access to computing resources, datasets and tools specific to the disciplines, scientists often use slow and tedious manual efforts to perform knowledge discovery to accomplish their research/education tasks. Recommender systems can provide expert guidance and can help them to navigate and discover relevant publications, tools, data sets, or even automate cloud resource configurations suitable for a given scientific task. To realize the potential of integration of recommenders in science gateways in order to spur research productivity, we present a novel "OnTimeRecommend" recommender system. The OnTimeRecommend comprises of several integrated recommender modules implemented as microservices that can be augmented to a science gateway in the form of a recommender-as-a-service. The guidance for use of the recommender modules in a science gateway is aided by a chatbot plug-in viz., Vidura Advisor. To validate our OnTimeRecommend, we integrate and show benefits for both novice and expert users in domain-specific knowledge discovery within two exemplar science gateways, one in neuroscience (CyNeuro) and the other in bioinformatics (KBCommons).

New molecular marker for phylogenetic reconstruction of black yeast-like fungi (Chaetothyriales) with hypothetical EIF2AK2 kinase gene

In eukaryotes, phosphorylation of the α-subunit of eIF2 is a mechanism to adjust cellular gene expression profiles in response to specific signals. The eIF2α kinases are a group of serine–threonine kinases that perform important functions in response to infection, proteotoxicity, and nutrient scavenging. The conserved nature of eIF2α kinases among fungi makes them potential evolutionary markers, which may contribute to deeper understanding of taxonomy and evolution. To date, only few studies are available of eIF2α kinases in black yeasts, which are members of Chaetothyriales containing potential agents of a gamut of major human diseases, such as chromoblastomycosis, phaeohyphomycosis and mycetoma. To establish the phylogenetic validity of sequences of eIF2α kinases hypothetical genes, we compared these genes between members of different classes of fungi, including black yeasts and allies, aiming at evaluation of the phylogeny of this group using an alternative molecular marker, compared to standard ribosomal genes. Trees generated with eIF2α kinase sequences of fungi were compared with those generated by ribosomal internal transcribed spacers (ITS rDNA) sequences from the same species. Sequences used were obtained from the protein Non-redundant database of NCBI, were aligned using CLUSTALX v1.8 and alignments were analyzed with RAxML v8.2.9 on the CIPRES Science Gateway portal. The trees generated had similar topologies, demonstrating that eIF2α kinases hypothetical gene sequences present a coherent reflection of evolution among fungi, compared to trees reconstructed by the use of ribosomal sequences. Our preliminary findings with a limited dataset strongly suggest that the evolution of kinases among black yeasts follows a similar path as revealed by ribosomal data, which underlines the validity of current taxonomy of black yeasts and relatives.

Building Science Gateways for Analysing Molecular Docking Results Using a Generic Framework and Methodology

Molecular docking and virtual screening experiments require large computational and data resources and high-level user interfaces in the form of science gateways. While science gateways supporting such experiments are relatively common, there is a clearly identified need to design and implement more complex environments for further analysis of docking results. This paper describes a generic framework and a related methodology that supports the efficient development of such environments. The framework is modular enabling the reuse of already existing components. The methodology, which proposes three techniques that the development team can use, is agile and encourages active participation of end-users. Based on the framework and methodology, two prototype implementations of science-gateway-based docking environments are presented and evaluated. The first system recommends a receptor-ligand pair for the next docking experiment, and the second filters docking results based on ligand properties.

Targeting economic development with science and technology parks and gateway cities: Schumpeterian possibilities of new developmental states in fostering local and global development

ABSTRACT In this paper, we investigate how innovative environments as a local strategic policy with particular features of the new entrepreneurial developmental state associated to what we call a Schumpeterian-style of policy can transform regions of middle-income countries, like Brazil. In particular, we sought to answer the following research question: how the São José dos Campos Science and Technology Park (STP-SJC) has been used as a tool to promote regional development? To answer it, having a logical model of this policy in perspective, we focus on this environment’s main objectives and empirically we performed a case study applying process tracing methodology.

Future zoonis forecasting of Betacoronavirus group using phylogenetics and haplotype network analysis

Genetic diversity and species relationship contribute to the inter-species transmission of coronavirus-derived diseases. This research aimed to investigate the probability of newly emergence Betacoronavirus zoonosis according to genetic relationship and haplotype network. A total of 24 Betacoronavirus sequences from different continents were used to construct the phylogenetic tree and the haplotype network. A phylogenetic tree was constructed using the Maximum Likelihood method with RaxML in CIPRES Science Gateway portal and GTRGAMMA+I analysis with 1000 bootstrap. Haplotype Network was done using Network 10.0.0.0 version with median-joining analysis. The result of the phylogenetic and haplotype network formed 4 groups of Betacoronavirus. Group A consisted of Human Coronavirus (HCoV) type OC43 and HKU1, Bovine Coronavirus, and Rodent Coronavirus. Group B consisted of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Group C consisted of MERS-CoV (2012 pandemic) and MERS-CoV from camels. Reliable with phylogenetic results, haplotype network also grouped Betacoronaviruses into three groups in accordance with their subgenera. Bovine and Rodent coronavirus are constant to group with previously human coronavirus, i.e. HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1, respectively. According to the high genetic similarity that the Bovine and Rodent coronavirus may infect to human and provide a new emergence. This study is basic for further research related to inter-species transmission from animal to human.

Unidata Science Gateway for Enabling Science as a Service to Facilitate Open Science and Reproducible Research

Unidata, an NSF-funded geoscience cyberinfrastructure facility, has deployed data infrastructure and data-proximate scientific workflows and analysis tools, using cloud computing technologies, for analyzing and visualizing well-documented datasets that combine robust access to well-documented datasets. Docker containers and Jupyter notebooks, and other analytic methods are enabled via “Software as a Service” and “Data as a Service”. The collective impact of these services is to enable scientists to not only conduct their research but also share their work with other researchers.

Design of a Flexible, User Friendly Feature Matrix Generation System and its Application on Biomedical Datasets

The generation of a feature matrix is the first step in conducting machine learning analyses on complex data sets such as those containing DNA, RNA or protein sequences. These matrices contain information for each object which have to be identified using complex algorithms to interrogate the data. They are normally generated by combining the results of running such algorithms across various datasets from different and distributed data sources. Thus for non-computing experts the generation of such matrices prove a barrier to employing machine learning techniques. Further since datasets are becoming larger this barrier is augmented by the limitations of the single personal computer most often used by investigators to carry out such analyses. Here we propose a user friendly system to generate feature matrices in a way that is flexible, scalable and extendable. Additionally by making use of The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) software, the process can be speeded up using distributed volunteer computing possible in most institutions. The system makes use of a combination of the Grid and Cloud User Support Environment (gUSE), combined with the Web Services Parallel Grid Runtime and Developer Environment Portal (WS-PGRADE) to create workflow-based science gateways that allow users to submit work to the distributed computing. This report demonstrates the use of our proposed WS-PGRADE/gUSE BOINC system to identify features to populate matrices from very large DNA sequence data repositories, however we propose that this system could be used to analyse a wide variety of feature sets including image, numerical and text data.

Optimizing computational resource management for the scientific gateways ecosystems based on the service‐oriented paradigm

SummaryScience Gateways provide portals for experiments execution, regardless of the users' computational background. Nowadays its construction and performance need enhancement in terms of resource provision and task scheduling. We present the Modular Distributed Architecture to support the Protein Structure Prediction (MDAPSP), a Service‐Oriented Architecture for management and construction of Science Gateways, with resource provisioning on a heterogeneous environment. The Decision Maker, central module of MDAPSP, defines the best computational environment according to experiment parameters. The proof of concept for MDAPSP is presented in WorkflowSim, with two novel schedulers. Our results demonstrate good Quality of Service (QoS), capable of correctly distributing the workload, fair response times, providing load balance, and overall system improvement. The study case relies on PSP algorithms and the Galaxy framework, with monitoring experiments to show the bottlenecks and critical aspects.

BioinfoPortal: A scientific gateway for integrating bioinformatics applications on the Brazilian national high-performance computing network

Science gateways have gained increasing attention in the last years from diverse communities. Science gateways are software solutions that bring out the integration of reusable data and specialized techniques via Web servers while hiding the complexity of the underlying high-performance computing resources. Several projects and initiatives have been started worldwide to develop frameworks that support the broad range of key scientific domains. Biological sciences are undergoing a revolution since novel technologies, such as next-generation sequencing, allow data generation in exascale dimensions. Bioinformatics covers a wide range of important applications in health, diversity, and life sciences with the understanding of the high-performance computing culture to accelerate the transition of computational simulations of biological systems at all scales. The article introduces the BioinfoPortal gateway, its architecture, functionalities, and the integration to the CSGrid middleware used to manage the high-performance computing environment of the Brazilian National High-Performance Computing System, SINAPAD, including the Santos Dumont supercomputer. We present a discussion about the challenges of integrating BioinfoPortal and CSGrid framework, which considers the general process of the installation, configuration, and deployment. Finally, we present the findings of the performance analysis of high-performance computing applications, presenting how machine learning was applied to optimize the functionality of BioinfoPortal based on recommending predictive models for the efficient allocation of resources obtained over 75% of performance efficiency.

First Report of Phaeoacremonium minimum Associated with Grapevine Trunk Diseases in China

Grapevine trunk diseases (GTDs) are a complex of diseases that strongly affect grape productivity, wine quality, and vineyard longevity worldwide. GTDs occur in diverse regions, and in some areas disease agents are present in up to 100% of vines (Pintos et al. 2018). Recently, species belonging to Botryosphaeria and Diaporthe were identified as pathogens associated with GTDs in China (Dissanayake et al. 2015; Yan et al. 2013). During 2017 to 2018, interveinal leaf necrosis and wood white decay surrounded by brown necrosis in longitudinal section and black spots in cross section were observed in several grapevines (Cabernet) in Huailai County, Hebei Province, China. Disease incidence was up to 2 to 3% of the vineyard. Diseased samples (whole trunk and roots of 19-year-old vines) were collected and taken to the laboratory. Woody samples were cut into small chips, surface sterilized in 1.5% NaOCl for 3 min followed by 70% ethanol for 30 s, and rinsed three times with sterile distilled water (SDW). Once the samples were dried, they were placed onto PDA plates amended with ampicillin (0.1 g/liter). Plates were incubated at 25°C under dark conditions. After 14 days of incubation, hyphal tips of fungi growing from wood pieces were transferred onto new PDA plates and incubated until they produced conidia. One type of colony was consistently isolated from the discolored tissue, with honey brown mycelium, and producing a yellow pigment on PDA. Conidia were ellipsoid to allantoid, 3.8 to 6.2 μm long, and 1.6 to 3.2 μm wide (n = 50). Morphologically these isolates resembled species belonging to Phaeoacremonium (Mostert et al. 2006). For species confirmation, genomic DNA of three representative isolates (JZB3190001, JZB3190003, and JZB3190005) was extracted. PCR amplification was performed using two phylogenetic markers (actin and β-tubulin) amplified with primers ACT-513F/ACT-783R (Carbone and Kohn 1999) and T1/Bt2b (Glass and Donaldson 1995). The sequences obtained were deposited in GenBank under the accession numbers MK994188 to MK994193. Phylogenetic analysis was conducted using maximum likelihood in RAxML, which was accomplished using RAxML-HPC2 on XSEDE in the CIPRES Science Gateway platform (http://www.phylo.org/). In the phylogenetic tree, the isolates from the present study clustered together with Phaeoacremonium minimum (CBS 246.91), with 100 bootstrap values. Based on morphological characters and phylogenetic results, the species isolated in this study was identified as P. minimum (Tul. & C. Tul.) D. Gramaje, L. Mostert & Crous (Gramaje et al. 2015). The pathogenicity test was conducted on healthy, 2-month-old, rooted ‘Furcal’ grapevines that were grown in an inoculation chamber. Roots were washed using flow water and rinsed with SDW. The ends of SDW-treated roots (roughly 1 cm) were cut with sterilized scissors, and the roots and trunk base of Furcal vines were dipped in a 10⁶/ml P. minimum spore suspension for 30 min. Inoculated plants were immediately planted in individual pots, and 10 ml of spore suspension was added to the soil per pot. SDW was used as a control. Two P. minimum isolates (JZB3190001 and JZB3190003) were used to do the pathogenicity test, and 10 plants were inoculated with each isolate and the control water. Temperature of the inoculation chamber was controlled between 24 and 25°C, and humidity was maintained at 60%. After 114 days of inoculation, the inoculated plants developed black necrosis at the base of wood but did not show leaf necrosis, whereas the control plants showed no symptoms both in wood and leaves. Koch’s postulates were confirmed by reisolating and identification based on cultural and morphological characters of the inoculated isolates. To our knowledge, this is the first report of P. minimum associated with GTDs in China. The results of this study will enhance the capability of controlling GTDs in China by correct identification of the causal organism.

The Social Media Macroscope: A science gateway for research using social media data

In recent years, the explosion of social media platforms and the public collection of social data has brought forth a growing desire and need for research capabilities in the realm of social media and social data analytics. Research on this scale, however, requires a high level of computational and data-science expertise, limiting the researchers who are capable of undertaking social media data-driven research to those with significant computational expertise or those who have access to such experts as part of their research team. The Social Media Macroscope (SMM) is a science gateway with the goal of removing that limitation and making social media data, analytics, and visualization tools accessible to researchers and students of all levels of expertise. The SMM provides a single point of access to a suite of intuitive web interfaces for performing social media data collection, analysis, and visualization via for open-source and commercial tools. Within the SMM social scientists are able to process and store large datasets and collaborate with other researchers by sharing ideas, data, and methods. This document functions as a brief primer on the initial build of the SMM and we end this paper discussing future directions for the SMM.

A citizen science exploration of the X-ray transient sky using the EXTraS science gateway

Modern soft X-ray observatories can yield unique insights into time domain astrophysics, and a huge amount of information is stored – and largely unexploited – in data archives. Like a treasure-hunt, the EXTraS project harvested the hitherto unexplored temporal domain information buried in the serendipitous data collected by the European Photon Imaging Camera instrument onboard the XMM-Newton satellite in 20 years of observations. The result is a vast catalogue, describing the temporal behaviour of hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources. But the catalogue is just a starting point because it has to be, in its turn, further analysed. During the project an education activity has been defined and run in several workshops for high school students in Italy, Germany and UK. The final goal is to engage the students, and in perspective citizen scientists, to go through the whole validation process: they look into the data and try to discover new sources, or to characterize already known sources. This paper describes how the EXTraS science gateway is used to accomplish these tasks and highlights the first discovery, a flaring X-ray source in the globular cluster NGC 6540.

The ICTBioMed NCIP Hub: Cancer research in a science gateway consortium

ICTBioMed, the International Consortium for Technology in Biomedicine is a consortium for biomedical collaborative research and the consortium partners believe in decentralization and democratization of science. The consortium works on strategies to develop ready-to-use research initiatives bridging the gap between research, implementation and ready-to-use science. The consortium has identified real science use cases with the help of the collaborative partners to get access of shared data and methods using the principles of science gateways. ICTBioMed has set up an NCIP Hub instance based upon the HUBzero framework and started using it for community research activities. It is an environment for scientific collaboration where researchers can access and take advantage of a variety of resources shared by others. The NCIP Hub supports members with shared access to data, tools, and standards across the cancer research community. Cancer researchers, in principle, have access to a wide range of data and software tools but in practice, however, they make limited use of these resources. Barriers that restrict access include the need to install software locally, inconsistent user interfaces, security concerns and poor documentation. ICTBioMed is developing a cancer science gateway that will greatly simplify analysis in cancer imaging research by offering a single point of entry and a unified interface for multiple tools, databases, and image repositories widely used by the community. The consortium aims at borderless research with a common goal to solve real life biomedical problems by facilitating collaborative research.

Managing authentication and authorization in distributed science gateway middleware

Establishing users’ identities and determining their permissions before they access research infrastructure resources are key features of science gateways. With many science gateways now relying on general purpose gateway platform services, the challenges of managing identity-derived features have expanded to include network-based authentication and authorization scenarios that connect science gateway tenants, science gateway platform middleware, and third party identity provider services, including campus identity management systems. This paper examines both architectural and implementation considerations for integrating these services. We provide a summary case study that further shows how end-to-end authentication and authorization can be provided between gateways, campus authentication systems, science gateway middleware, and campus computing resources. We conclude with observations on lifecycle management of third party components in science gateway platform services, which is an important consideration for both selection of new technologies and transitioning from older systems.

First Report of Lonsdalea populi Causing Bark Canker Disease on Poplar in Portugal

In November 2017, vertical cankers were observed in the trunk of 120 trees growing in a plantation of hybrid poplar (Populus × euramericana) of 12 ha in the district of Santarem (Portugal), suggesting a bacterial disease. The trees had been imported from France and planted in 2011. The vertically cracked bark presented a whitish creamy mass delimited by dark brown exudates. Under the microscope, the creamy mass was found to be composed by a large number of individuals of the free-living, bacte-riophagous nematode Panagrellus redivivus, as also reported by Toth et al. (2013), who suggested that large numbers of bacteria are present in the bark canker. Samples of cankers and exudates were macerated and extracts plated on King’s B medium. Cultures yielded bacterial isolates showing colonies white-ivory colored, bright, round, slightly convex, and not fluorescent under ultraviolet light. Nine isolates were selected and further characterized by phenotypic (biochemical data, fatty acid profiles, and carbon source utilization by Biolog GEN III and API 20E test plates) and phylogenetic analysis. A Lonsdalea populi strain was also included for comparison. Colonies were gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, levan and esculin hydrolysis positive, but did not have cytochrome c oxidase or urease activity and did not induce a hypersensitivity response on tobacco plants. The symptomatology in the affected poplars and the results of the phenotypic analyses of the isolates were similar to those reported for L. populi (Berruete et al. 2016; Li et al. 2014, 2017; Toth et al. 2013). Partial sequences of the 16S rDNA gene and housekeeping genes gapA, atpD, gyrB, and infB showed 99 to 100% identity with isolates of L. populi available at the GenBank database. The neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree, inferred by the CIPRES Science Gateway after online alignment by the MAFFT program version 7 of 16S rDNA and housekeeping gene sequences, further identified the isolates as L. populi. Sequences from two representative isolates (EFA-L5 and EFA-L6) from this study were submitted to GenBank (accession nos. MH469711 and MH469712 for 16S rRNA gene, MH496625 and MH496626 for gapA, MH559348 and MH559349 for atpD, MH824634 and MH824635 for gyrB, and MH899112 and MH899113 for infB). Pathogenicity of EFA-L5 and EFA-L6 isolates was tested on nursery plants of P. × euramericana ‘I-214’. For each bacterial isolate, a suspension in water was prepared as inoculum (10⁷ CFU/ml). Five plants were inoculated with EFA-L5 and another five with EFA-L6. In each inoculated plant, two incisions were made in the trunk, and 100 µl of the corresponding bacterial suspension applied in each incision. Sterile distilled water was applied in incisions similarly made in the trunk of five control plants. All plants were placed in a growth chamber at 85 to 90% humidity and 22 ± 3°C. A watery necrosis area was observed in all inoculated plants 7 days after inoculation, but not in control plants. After 3 months, decay and death of most inoculated plants were observed. L. populi was reisolated from symptomatic plants, thus fulfilling Koch’s postulates. L. populi has been reported causing bark canker disease in poplar in Hungary, China, and Spain (Berruete et al. 2016; Li et al. 2014; Toth et al. 2013). To our knowledge this is the first report of L. populi on poplar in Portugal. More research is needed to know the distribution of bark canker disease in this country, because it could have a significant economic impact on poplar plantations.

The Science Gateways Community Institute: Collaborations and efforts on international scale

Abstract The Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI), opened in August 2016, provides free resources, services, experts, and ideas for creating and sustaining science gateways. It offers five areas of services to the science gateway developer and user communities: the Incubator, Extended Developer Support, the Scientific Software Collaborative, Community Engagement and Exchange, and Workforce Development. While all these areas are available to US-based communities, the Incubator, the Scientific Software Collaborative and the Community Engagement and Exchange also serve international communities. We aim to reach out and support gateways on an international scale by forming and deepening collaborations with partner organizations and coalitions beneficial and/or related to the science gateways community. Research topics are independent of national borders and researchers spread worldwide can benefit from each other’s research results, software, data and from lessons learned — via online materials and publications or at international events. The gateway community has long benefited from this type of exchange. This paper will present related work describing the benefits of international collaborations generally, and specifically as they relate to science gateways. We go into detail regarding SGCI’s ongoing work on an international scale and its work planned in the near future.