ARCHIVED: What is a science gateway, and is it related to portals?

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The terms "portal" and "science gateway" both refer to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) designed to make it easier to work with computers generally; they are often confused.

A portal is a general term for any system designed to facilitate your use of computer-based resources (typically implying some resource beyond your personal computer, and an interface other than the GUI provided by your computer's operating system). A common type is a web portal, a website that provides personalized capabilities to its visitors. Web portals use a variety of middleware, hardware, and distributed applications to provide services from different sources.

The term "science gateway" refers to an interface designed specifically to support a particular type of scientific research, with an emphasis on supporting the entire scientific process from start to finish. Science gateways require considerable effort to create, and are typically designed to help an entire community of researchers use high-performance computing resources and advanced cyberinfrastructures to pursue common scientific goals.

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) develops science gateways for areas including severe weather prediction, astronomical observations, computational chemistry, genomics, and nanoscience.

For more about XSEDE Science Gateways, see the Science Gateways page on the XSEDE website.

This document was developed with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grants 1053575 and 1548562. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.