2. Using and Developing Gateways and Some Gateways of Interest
Overview
Questions
- How are science gateways used?
- What are some resources to assist in the development of gateways and data plans for projects?
- What are some examples of scientific gateways that may be of interest to researchers?
Objectives
- Understand various aspects about gateways; from developing a gateway for a project to how to use a gateway
- Discover some existing scientific gateways that may be of interest to the audience
Using Science Gateways
Using a gateway will be the main focus of this workshop. The audience will get first-hand experience using a scientific gateway with a predetermined dataset. The gateway we will be exploring in the next episode is HydroShare, a gateway created for water sciences and sharing and analyzing water data.
Note: Scientific Gateway Features
Depending on the needs of the communities, a gateway may provide any of the following features:
- High-performance computation resources
- Workflow tools
- Data storage and metadata/documentation tools
- General or domain-specific analytic and visualization software
- Collaborative interfaces
- HPC job submission tools
- Education modules
Developing and Integrating Science Gateways
Scientific gateways can be helpful when developing a data management plan for a research project. There are resources available to those interested in developing a gateway for their research community.
Scientific Gateways Community Institute
In 2016, a team led by the San Diego Supercomputing Center was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to establish an institute to accelerate the development of scientific gateways which address the needs of researchers across NSF’s directorates. This institute bacame the Scientific Gateways Community Institute, SGCI.
Organizations like Scientific Gateways Community Institute provide great resources to help when building a scientific gateway. Their goal is to facilitate the sharing of experiences, technologies, and practices of those working with science gateways. SGCI hosts workshops on developing, operating and sustaining gateways as well as provides a science gateway catalog giving users a means to discover gateways within different disciplines. Furthermore, SGCI provides regular tech summits to help developers find solutions to common gateway-related issues.
Note: SGCI Offerings
SGCI offers a full range of services and expertise including:
- Building and running gateways
- Software developers expertise in building or enhancing an existing gateway in the areas of graphic design, cybersecurity, business and sustainability planning, and user engagement
- Usability and user engagement sustainability. (Stakeholder engagement is crucial in terms of keeping in the loop.)
- Free hosting, allowing gateway builders to test frameworks.
- Community resources and networking
- Education and training
SGCI provides large scale training, consulting services, learning opportunities and community which can be found at the SGCI website.
Examples of Some Existing Scientific Gateways
The following are some examples of existing scientific gateways which may be of interest to the audience. Attendees may visit these gateways and discover communities sharing domain specific data and workflows which may assist in their research projects.
(1) CyberInfrastructure for Phylogenetic RESearch, CIPRES
CIPRES is a gateway for systematic and population biology and Phylogenetics related research. It allows researchers to explore relationships between species using supercomputers provided by NSF’s XSEDE. Backed by an NSF award, CIPRES was developed to make supercomputing resources more accessible and flexible for phylogenetic researchers and is among the most popular gateways in the XSEDE community. It has supported more than 12,000 users and been a part of 1,300 publications on phylogenetics.
(2) ChemCompute
ChemCompute is a scientific gateway targeted towards the chemistry community and students. According to ChemCompute’s website, it provides computational chemistry software for undergraduate teaching and research. Their website contains pages for accessing data, various simulation and solver tools, as well as support for computational job submittals to their cloud clusters for workflow applications. ChemCompute’s goal is to enable faculty to incorporate computational chemistry into their undergraduate teaching and research curriculum without the hassle of compiling, installing, and maintaining software and hardware.
(3) Unidata: Data Proximate Services in the Cloud
Funded by the NSF, Unidata is diverse community of research and educational institutions which shares geoscience data and the tools to access and visualize it. They provide cyberinfrastructure, data services and tools to advance earth sciences. Additionally, Unidata develops, maintains, and supports a variety of software packages.
(4) OpenTopography
The NSF funded OpenTopography Facility is a gateway which targets the earth science community. It is a web-based system developed to give access to earth science-oriented LIDAR topography data. OpenTopography is NSF funded and provides free, online access to LIDAR data in a number of forms, including pre-computed raster data as well as the raw point cloud and associated geospatial-processing tools for customized analysis.
(5) HydroShare
HydroShare is an online collaboration environment for sharing data, models, and code for the water science community. It has extensive capabilities to create and discover new data sets while providing its own web apps which can be used in workflows to visualize, analyze, and run models. HydroShare additionally allows users to publish their data and models to satisfy data management plan requirements.
Some of the information used here was kindly provided by the following reference.
- “San Diego Supercomputer Center. https://www.sdsc.edu/services/hpc/science_gateways.html”
Note: Key Points
- Scientific gateways can provide researchers various features such as computational resources, workflow tools, and collaborative interfaces.
- There are various resources available for researchers interested in developing scientific gateways that can help educate them on various aspects of gateway development and where to get started.
- There are many scientific gateways aimed towards specific research communities already in existence. XSEDE and SGCI provide links to such gateways for researchers interested in accessing these gatways.