Posted by s.hettrick on 17 July 2013 - 4:04pm

By Kitti Varga, EGI.

The SCI-BUS project will make the life of e-Scientists easier by creating a new way to customise science gateways based on the generic-purpose gUSE/WS-PGRADE portal family. The customised science gateways will enable scientists to focus on their work and exploit resources of main Distributed Computing Infrastructures including clusters, supercomputers, grids, desktop grids, academic and commercial clouds, without the need to deal with the details of the underlying infrastructure.

Say "no" to learning new technologies: meet the science gateways

Science Gateways are frameworks that incorporate applications, data and tools to enable running applications on grid and cloud infrastructures. They also provide services to upload and share, search, manage or download applications and data. The gateways are integrated via portals or sets of applications. They enable user communities to use resources through a common graphical user interface in an easy and intuitive way. As a result, users can focus on their applications instead of learning and managing the complex underlying infrastructure.

The results

As of June 2013, the SCI-BUS project have 22 science gateways running using the SCI-BUS gateway technology, and 14 more using application-specific portals developed by members of the SCI-BUS community. These gateways support different communities, such as physics, bioinformatics, astrophysics, meteorology.

The workflow applications developed for the SCI-BUS gateways are uploaded and published in the SHIWA Repository. This allows other communities to take advantage not only by using the gateway technology and the portlets, but also the workflow applications.

STARnet: an advanced SCI-BUS

The idea of application-specific gateways has been developed even further: the astrophysics community has set up the STARnet Federation to create a network of science gateways to share a set of services for authentication, computing infrastructure access, and data and workflow repositories.

Ugo Becciani, one of the founders of STARnet said “Among the diversified variety of applications related to the astrophysics field we have selected so far some specialised use cases related to scientific visualisation, cosmological simulation, stellar evolution and comets and meteoroid dynamical evolution. Those applications were developed and maintained into the first core sites belonging to the STARnet Federation.”

Be a part of it

SCI-BUS is an open project: any organisation is welcome to join as an associated partner.  Associated partners will be actively supported by SCI-BUS to develop and set up their own science gateway and they can attend the SCI-BUS project meetings.