How to deploy a Science Gateway for my organisation/project/community
Science gateways have proven over the last years to be fertile ground for e-Infrastructure research while at the same time substantially increasing the usage and accessibility of Distributed Computing Infrastructures all around the world to scientists and educators.
By its most used definition a Science Gateway is “a community-developed set of tools, applications, and data that are integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, usually in a graphical user interface, that is further customized to meet the needs of a specific community” (www.xsede.org/gateways-overview). Science Gateways may provide access to a variety of capabilities including workflows, visualization, resource discovery, job execution and data management services.
In order to demonstrate the power of Science Gateways in real cases and for real applications during workshops and other kind of events and in the framework of collaborations with some VRC-specific projects, Sci-GaIA has adopted the Catania Science Gateway Framework[1] (CSGF). An important reason for the choice was the large number of standards supported by the CSGF:
1. The JSR 168 and JSR 286 standards (also known as “portlet 1.0” and “portlet 2.0” standards) for the presentation layer;
2. The OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard and its Shibboleth and SimpleSAMLphp implementations for user authentication;
3. The Lightweight Direct Access Protocol (LDAP), and its OpenLDAP implementation for user authorisation;
4. The Cryptographic Token Interface Standard (PKCS#11) standard and its Cryptoki implementation for X.509 robot certificate management;
5. The Open Grid Forum (OGF) Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) standard and its JSAGA implementation for both local and Grid middleware interoperability;
4. The Open Grid Forum (OGF) Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) standard and its rOCCI implementation for Cloud middleware interoperability and cloud interoperation.
In particular, the support of the SAML standard allows Science Gateways built with the CSGF to be configured as Service Providers of Identity Federations in order to extend their potential user base to all individuals enrolled in Identity Providers, owning federated credentials. Since Sci-GaIA is also committed to foster the deployment of Identity Federations in the regions addressed by the project, it was straightforward to choose a science gateway framework able to build services that could have acted as “triggers” for the establishment of IdFs.
Furthermore, the support for SAGA and OCCI standards allows to demonstrate DCI interoperability at application level irrespective of their architecture (local clusters, Grids, clouds, etc.).
If:
- You are interested in deploying a Science Gateway in your country, organisation or virtual research community, visit this website and/or send an email to [email protected]
- You are interested in browsing one of the Science Gateways promoted by the Sci-GaIA project visit the Africa Grid Science Gateway.
[1]V. Ardizzone et al., “The DECIDE Science Gateway”, Journal of Grid Computing December 2012, Volume 10, Issue 4, pp. 689-707 - DOI 10.1007/s10723-012-9242-3