Data Gateways forScientific Communities

Birds of a Feather (BoF)Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Craig Stewart (Indiana University) stewart@iu.edu

Chris Jordan (Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin) ctjordan@tacc.utexas.edu

Stephen Simms (Indiana University) ssimms@indiana.edu

License Terms• Please cite this presentation as: Stewart, C.A. , C. Jordan, S. Simms. 2008. Data

gateways for scientific communities – Birds of a Feather Session. (Presentation). 10 June 2008, TeraGrid ‘08 Conference, 9-13 June, Las Vegas, NV. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2022/14528

• Portions of this document that originated from sources outside IU are shown here and used by permission or under licenses indicated within this document.

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Science Gateways

www.nanohub.org

A Science Gateway is a domain-specific computing environment, typically accessed via the Web, that provides a scientific community with end-to-end support for a particular scientific workflow.

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TeraGrid and Data Collections

• Long list of data collections TeraGrid supports available from TeraGrid User Portal (https://portal.teragrid.org/)

• What may be much more important is what the TeraGrid can provide as a hosting environment for Data Collections – particularly when provided via some sort of gateway service

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U. Chicago SIDGrid

(sidgrid.ci.uchicago.edu)

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(www.chembiogrid.org)

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MutDB and CICC

(www.mutdb.org)

Groups involved in Data activities

• Technology:- Data Working Group- “Data Architecture” Group

• User-Focused:- Data Collections Working Group- Science Gateways Working Group

• Maybe a bit too complex…

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What does TeraGrid provide?

• Many individual data resources- Parallel file systems- Archives- Global File Systems (GPFS-WAN/Lustre)

• Some data management tools- Storage Resource Broker- Replica Location Services

• Data Management poorly organized

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Service-oriented models?

• Theory: Gateways utilize familiar (web) interfaces to ease access to computer-based resources

• Many commercial web services do the same thing

- From Flickr to Amazon S3

• Can TeraGrid (more) effectively use this model?

What should TeraGrid Provide, and what do you need?

• More emphasis on metadata?

• More support for forming new collections?

• More globally accessible file systems (or apparent file systems)?

• Better access mechanisms for organized, tagged metadata?

• Most of what I hear is about access and interfaces?

• Lots of discussions going on around gateways, data collections, long-term preservation, metadata, search mechanisms, etc., etc., etc. We need open discussions and feedback from the community!

• What can the TeraGrid do to provide data-centric services more widely, effectively, and easily for the data providers?

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