ARCHIVED: On XSEDE, what is a Science Gateway?

An Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) 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 XSEDE services in back
• A grid-bridging gateway, with communities running their own grids devoted to their areas of science (in these cases, a Science Gateway is a mechanism for extending the reach of the community's grid by coupling it with XSEDE digital services)
• A gateway that lets users run a desktop application to access XSEDE 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 XSEDE through the various service interfaces that XSEDE provides. Although the gateways may be instantiated on XSEDE services, it is expected that many will be instantiated on community resources and be administered by the community itself.