Conveners
Science Gateways: Harmonising Development and Provisioning
- Nuno Ferreira (EGI.EU)
Science Gateways: Harmonising Development and Provisioning
- Nuno Ferreira (EGI.EU)
Description
As the digital research landscape broadens, so more research communities are seeking to establish community or science domain specific environments for data sharing and analysis scenarios. These environments, the so called Virtual Research Environments (VREs) use a mix of EGI, third party academic and commercial resources to support multi-national communities on a sustainable and long term basis. Science gateways are key enablers of VREs: they integrate and provide a coherent view of the various software tools and services that a researcher needs for a custom analysis workflow. Authentication frameworks, visualisation tools, monitors, databases, workflow systems, job execution pilots are few examples from the rich set of services that science gateways glue together and make easily consumable through a Web portal or a desktop application.
Over the last decade the members of the European Grid Infrastructure collaboration accumulated rich knowledge on developing, deploying, operating and monitoring science gateways. EGI members provide nearly 30 science gateways for various scientific groups in Europe and beyond. Many of these gateways are built from 'off the shelf' frameworks or components that exist as reusable products to those who wish to build new gateways for their own specific needs. (The gateways and the enabling technologies are listed here: http://go.egi.eu/sciencegateways)
The contributions of this double-session will focus on various technical aspects of science gateway enabling technologies and of gateway development. The EGI-InSPIRE project recently started a 'Virtual Team' with participants from 15 NGIs and from EGI.eu to develop a primer document for gateway developers (https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/VT_Science_Gateway_Primer). The document will collect best practices and state of the art in relevant technological and policy areas. The double-session will provide an opportunity to update the community about the activities to be covered by the primer document and that facilitate the adoption of EGI gateways and gateway technologies within the European Research Area.
