Science Gateways are virtual environments that dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientific communities to utilize distributed computational and data resources (that is, cyberinfrastructure). Successful Science Gateways provide access to sophisticated and powerful resources, while shielding their users from the resources' complexities. Given Science Gateways' demonstrated impact on progress in many scientific fields, it is important to remove barriers to the creation of new gateways and make it easier to sustain them. The Science Gateway Platform (SciGaP) project will create a set of hosted infrastructure services that can be easily adopted by gateway providers to build new gateways based on robust and reliable open source tools. The proposed work will transform the way Science Gateways are constructed by significantly lowering the development overhead for communities requiring access to cyberinfrastructure, and support the efficient utilization of shared resources.
SciGaP will transform access to large scale computing and data resources by reducing development time of new gateways and by accelerating scientific research for communities in need of access to large-scale resources. SciGaP's adherence to open community and open governance principles of the Apache Software Foundation will assure open source software access and open operation of its services. This will give all project stakeholders a voice in the software and will clear the proprietary fog that surrounds cyberinfrastructure services. The benefits of SciGaP services are not restricted to scientific fields, but can be used to accelerate progress in any field of endeavor that is limited by access to computational resources. SciGaP services will be usable by a community of any size, whether it is an individual, a lab group, a department, an institution, or an international community. SciGaP will help train a new generation of cyberinfrastructure developers in open source development, providing these early career developers with the ability to make publicly documented contributions to gateway software and to bridge the gap between academic and non-academic development.
