Award Abstract # 1032742
SDCI NMI Improvement: Open Gateway Computing Environments - Tools for Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Science and Education

NSF Org: OAC
Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
Recipient: TRUSTEES OF INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: August 31, 2010
Latest Amendment Date: June 10, 2013
Award Number: 1032742
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Daniel Katz
OAC
�Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
CSE
�Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr
Start Date: September 1, 2010
End Date: August 31, 2014�(Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $1,500,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $1,638,917.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2010 = $1,500,000.00
FY 2013 = $138,917.00
History of Investigator:
  • Marlon Pierce (Principal Investigator)
    marpierc@indiana.edu
  • Suresh Marru (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Sudhakar Pamidighantam (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Xiaohui Carol Song (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Emre Brookes (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Indiana University
107 S INDIANA AVE
BLOOMINGTON
IN �US �47405-7000
(317)278-3473
Sponsor Congressional District: 09
Primary Place of Performance: Indiana University
107 S INDIANA AVE
BLOOMINGTON
IN �US �47405-7000
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
09
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): YH86RTW2YVJ4
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): XD-Extreme Digital,
SOFTWARE DEVELOPEMENT FOR CI,
Software Institutes
Primary Program Source: 01001011DB�NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001314DB�NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7433, 7683, 8009
Program Element Code(s): 747600, 768300, 800400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070, 47.080

ABSTRACT

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.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Lee, Hyungro, Youngik Yang, Heejoon Chae, Seungyoon Nam, Donghoon Choi, Patanachai Tangchaisin, Chathura Herath, Suresh Marru, Kenneth P. Nephew, and Sun Kim "BioVLAB-MMIA: A Cloud Environment for microRNA and mRNA Integrated Analysis (MMIA) on Amazon EC2" IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience, , v.11 , 2012 , p.266
Memon, Shahbaz, Morris Riedel, Florian Janetzko, Borries Demeler, Gary Gorbet, Suresh Marru, Andrew Grimshaw et al. "Advancements of the UltraScan scientific gateway for open standards?based cyberinfrastructures." Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (2014). , 2014
Shen, Ning, Ye Fan, and Sudhakar Pamidighantam "E-science infrastructures for molecular modeling and parametrization" Journal of Computational Science , 2014
Padmanabhan, Anand, Shaowen Wang, Guofeng Cao, Myunghwa Hwang, Zhenhua Zhang, Yizhao Gao, Kiumars Soltani, and Yan Liu. "FluMapper: A cyberGIS application for interactive analysis of massive location?based social media." Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience , 2014
Wang, Shaowen, Luc Anselin, Budhendra Bhaduri, Christopher Crosby, Michael F. Goodchild, Yan Liu, and Timothy L. Nyerges. "CyberGIS software: a synthetic review and integration roadmap" International Journal of Geographical Information Science , v.27 , 2013

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

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 ac...

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