September 7, 2022 — Since 2016, the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) has been bringing together software developers to improve access to essential resources and services with a “community hub” approach. By offering development assistance, usability engagements, sustainability training and more, SGCI has helped more than 150 science gateways achieve their goals.
Through a combination of cyberinfrastructure (CI) components, “science gateways” typically make it easier for researchers and educators to connect to computing resources, share data, facilitate scholarly collaboration, publish content, and engage with a large audience. To broaden the impact in these ways, the team behind the SGCI has proposed a new effort that has won support and special recognition as a Center of Excellence (CoE) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Officially titled CI CoE: SGX3, a Center of Excellence to Expand Access, Expand Community, and Illustrate Best Practices for CI through Science Gateways (SGX3 for short), the new initiative has received $7.5 million dollars from the NSF and went into effect on September 1. , 2022.
SGX3 was designed by San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Sustainable Software Director Michael Zentner, along with team members Maytal Dahan (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Sandra Gesing (Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois), Linda Hayden (Elizabeth City State University), Marlon Pierce (Indiana University), Claire Stirm (SDSC) and Paul Parsons (Purdue), in response to challenges faced by science gateways in architecture, skills and workforce stability, sustainability and planning for the future.
[Bee] Hives and Plan Factories
Over the past six years, SGCI has observed that the community of gateway developers, gateway owners/operators, and gateway end users tend to operate relatively independently, sometimes to their detriment. For example, gateway owners/operators are often unaware that they face similar issues as others; end users are only aware of a gateway they use in their work, and their experiences and ideas for improvement are not transferred to the wider community, and gateway framework creators are constantly reinventing everyone’s capabilities, etc
“By modeling our operations as a beehive, we will illustrate how we hope to influence the science gateway community to behave in the same way,” Zentner said. “By behaving more like a hive, each stakeholder can still retain their independence, but can also be more aware of how their efforts can contribute to the collective capabilities of the community.”
A key aspect of the SGX3 mission is to provide prospective studies of Next Generation Science Gateway capabilities. SGX3, for example, will offer a new service called Blueprint Factories, where it will work with collaborators to better understand the CI needs of entire research communities and cyberinfrastructure providers nationwide.
“The Blueprint Factories are an important way to keep the fingers of the CI community up to date with changing scientific needs,” said Pierce, who will lead this component.
Four Blueprint factories are currently engaged. Two are aimed at understanding the needs of expanding access to NSF-funded large-scale computing resources. Another is focused on the field of materials science. A fourth Blueprint Factory will focus on sustainability best practices. SGX3 will also drive up to three additional Blueprint Factory for specific science areas.
According to Zentner, the team has received inquiries about whether or not SGX3 is a continuation of SGCI. He explained that while SGCI will continue to operate beyond its NSF funding, in line with its sustainability plan, SGX3 is a “different thing”.
“We’ve reframed some of our previous activities to focus more on helping science gateways form partnerships in SGX3, but we’re also putting a lot more emphasis on bringing ‘science’ into the realm of gateways. scientists,” Zentner said. “To really meet the needs of science, it needs to be a much more equal partnership between scientists in the field and cyberinfrastructure professionals. Our community development and new Blueprint Factories effort specifically addresses this.
Meeting the Changing Needs of Science
Zentner noted that science gateways must also adapt to new scientific needs that continually arise through newly funded large computing infrastructures, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), resource requirements FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable), physical separation of data from computing resources, regulated data requirements, and availability of new or specialized computing resources.
“Such issues require prior thinking about how future science gateway technology should evolve to address these issues and the scientific areas where they are important,” Zentner explained. “SGX3 is designed to serve the science gateway community by helping its members make decisions on how to launch effectively, guiding best practices and sustainability decisions, and serving as a point of expertise to help gateways to navigate the future needs of scientific research and education.”
The plan is for SGX3 to accomplish all of this through four axes:
- develop a diverse community,
- Workforce Development,
- serving as experts to the community and
- envisioning the future.
Wider impacts
The anticipated broader impacts of SGX3 activities include enriching existing relationships and cultivating new ties with minority-serving institutions to embed pathway development into curricula; the introduction of domain-specific gateways to relevant classrooms and search parameters; and teacher training to intensify these efforts to grow and live beyond SGX3.
SGX3 also plans to: host graduate students working on real gateway frameworks that serve real end users; develop its own staff, not only technologically, but also with mentoring skills and operate a dynamic user experience (UX) consultancy, largely staffed by students who will learn scientific computing and UX requirements associated with it by working with real science gateway operators.
SGX3’s lecture series and outreach activities will have a particular focus on reaching more scientists in the field who may be involved in science gateways as part of their research, but who are unaware that ‘there is a whole community of people who facilitate the creation and operation of scientific gateways. and uses.
Beyond these direct efforts, each science gateway supported by SGX3 is by definition intended to broaden the impact of the research and educational resources provided by that gateway to as broad a community as possible.
“All of our activities support this goal of our customer base and greatly amplify SGX3’s broader impact beyond its internal activities,” said Sandra Gesing, Co-PI of SGX3 leading its community building effort. . “By supporting scientific gateways serving diverse fields, SGX3 will accelerate socially and economically beneficial research that addresses, for example, climate change, improving global food sustainability, water and land use planning , the innovation of new materials, the acceleration of the development of new drugs and much more.
More details about SGX3 will be shared at future community meetings and at the Gateways 2022 conference, October 18-20 in San Diego, CA. Visit sciencegateways.org for more information. You can read more about the impacts of SGCI customers in the SGCI Storybook.
SGX3 is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant #2231406).
Source: SDSC