On the TeraGrid, what is a Science Gateway?

A Science Gateway is a community-developed set of tools, applications, and data collections that are integrated via a portal or a suite of applications. Gateways provide access to a variety of capabilities including workflows, visualization, resource discovery, and job execution services.

Science Gateways enable entire communities of users associated with a common scientific goal to use national resources through a common interface. Science Gateways are enabled by a community allocation whose goal is to delegate account management, accounting, certificates management, and user support to the gateway developers.

Science Gateways commonly take one of these three forms:

• A gateway packaged as a web portal, with users in front and TeraGrid services in back
  
  
• A grid-bridging gateway. Often communities run their own grids devoted to their areas of science. In these cases, the Science Gateway is a mechanism to extend the reach of the community grid so it may use the resources of the TeraGrid.
  
  
• A gateway that involves application programs running on users' desktop workstations that access TeraGrid services

Science Gateways can have varying goals and implementations. Some expose specific sets of community codes so that anonymous scientists can run them. Others may serve as a "metaportal", a community portal that brings a broad range of new services and applications to the community. A common trait of all three types is their interaction with the TeraGrid through the various service interfaces that TeraGrid provides. Although the gateways may be instantiated on TeraGrid resources, it is expected that many will be instantiated on community resources and be administered by the community itself.

For more, see the Science Gateways page on the TeraGrid web site. For information specific to principal investigators (PIs), see the Science Gateways for PIs page. For information specific to developers, see the Science Gateways for Developers page.

This document was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0503697 to the University of Chicago and subcontracted to Indiana University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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