Science Gateways and portals are Web-based user interface and accessibility tools that provide user-centric views of cyberinfrastructure: they convert computing resources into tools for Web-based science and education. Although numerous production gateways have been developed, problems remain. How can operational gateways sustain themselves as underlying resources and middleware change? How can a gateway leverage modern commercial Web techniques like gadgets and social networking? How can a gateway wrap complicated science applications as robust services and workflows that really work in day-to-day operation? Can startup gateways reuse proven software from mature gateways and avoid reinvention? The research team addresses these problems through the Open Gateways Computing Environments (OGCE) collaboration, an integrated group of software developers and operational gateway providers. Key partner gateways include GridChem, GISolve/SimpleGrid, the Purdue Scientific Data and CCSM Gateways, UltraScan, and MyOSG.
The goal of investigators is to provide high-quality implementations of software tools for Grid and Cloud-based scientific application management, workflow composition and enactment, and social network-capable gadget component management. The assembled team supports the full lifecycle of gateway software, from requirements gathering to operational use. This cycle is directly reflected in the project's structure. Feature requests, enhancements, and changes to the software are managed using the Apache meritocracy model. The team achieves long-term sustainability through participation in the Apache Software Foundation. Software developed by the researchers complies with relevant standards: scientific job management is provided through Web services generated by an application factory service; workflows are executed using open standards for enactment engines, and user interface components are compatible with the Open Social specification. Additionally the team investigates the extension of gadget components to the HUBzero framework.
Science gateways provide Web-based user interfaces and user-supporting services that increase the usability of the nation’s supercomputing research infrastructure, thus increasing the productivity of scientists and the capabilities of educators. Science gateways are the face of cyberinfrastructure. The goal of the Open Gateway Computing Environments (OGCE) project is to develop software that provides of common set of capabilities that can be used to build and operate science gateways. The OGCE’s strategy in this funded work was to use open source software to support the full science gateway lifecycle by integrating software developers with community gateway providers. This strategy was chosen to ensure that gateway software was not only developed and packaged for download but was also integrated with and responsive to the requirements of operational gateways. Intellectual Merit: Science gateways target a wide range of problems in supporting online scientific communities. Our project’s goal was to develop software that specifically supports the remote execution of scientific applications and workflows on campus clusters, international supercomputing facilities such as the NSF-funded XSEDE, and computational clouds. We also provided data and provenance management capabilities for computational scientific experiments, which are the foundation for scientific reproducibility and sharing. The OGCE’s major activities were developing and releasing software to support science gateways, integrating this software with client science gateways, and providing ongoing support and education. Client gateways include team member gateways, collaborations initiated through XSEDE ECSS support, and other collaborations initiated through outreach. The OGCE project has had considerable impact on the community through its full circle approach to gateway software development and integration into production usage. The graduation of OGCE-developed Airavata software from incubation in the Apache Software Foundation demonstrates the team’s ability to do formal releases through one of the largest distributors of open source software in the world. However, the OGCE philosophy is more than this: integrating gateway operators in the same team with software developers ensures that the software is truly capable of full-time operation. Gateway operators are first-class stakeholders in the software. This approach is similar to the DevOps philosophy embraced by the broader software community. Broader Impact: By their nature, science gateways impact other scientific and scholarly disciplines by making it easier for research communities to access computing and storage resources, and by enabling new capabilities such as advanced computational execution patterns and better data management. By supporting science gateways, the OGCE has had an impact on astronomy, astrophysics, bioinformatics, biophysics, material science, nanoscience, biomedicine, biochemistry, structural biology, computational chemistry, geosciences, medical research, and nuclear physics, as documented in our group’s publications since 2010. Project governance in scientific computing and cyberinfrastructure is an open problem in our community. As with open data, it is important to demonstrate that federally funded projects such as ours are producing open software that can be publicly accessed and reused. The OGCE project is fully committed to open source software and to bringing the best open source development and governance practices to its team members and the academic software community in general. The adoption of the Apache open governance model provides an extensible mechanism for adding new stakeholders to the project who are not directly funded. The OGCE’s attempt to directly address governance problems in open source cyberinfrastructure software is a unique impact of the project.
