Science Gateway Group Overview

Presentation to CREST, Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute.We present an overview of the Science Gateways Group, part of UITS's Research Technologies division. The mission of the Science Gateway Group is to develop free, open source and open community software that can be used to provide Web-based access to clusters, supercomputers, computing clouds, and other elements of cyberinfrastructure. Scientific workflows are an important component of Science Gateways, supporting the composition and execution of chains of independently developed (sequential and parallel) scientific applications. Apache Airavata is our team's scientific workflow software, which we use to support a number of collaborations and extended consulting activities as part of our participation in the NSF XSEDE program. Through these collaborations with application scientists in nuclear physics, astronomy, astrophysics, biophysics, and other fields, we are starting to identify general workflow execution patterns that go beyond simple chain and directed acyclic graph execution scenarios. We believe this work is complementary to the research work at CREST and would like to investigate opportunities for collaboration. We are advocates for the Apache Software Foundation's open model for community building and also discuss the implications of this on cyberinfrastructure software.The material of this presentation is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant NSF OCI Award 1032742, “SDCI NMI Improvement: Open Gateway Computing Environments - Tools for Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Science and Education” and by a subaward from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NSF OCI Award 1053575 “XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment”)