About the Science Gateway Platform (SciGaP) project

The Science Gateway Platform (SciGaP) project is a collaborative effort funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide services that facilitate and broaden the development of web-based gateways used to further scientific discovery. SciGaP will be developed as a hosted Platform as a Service (PaaS) for science gateways. It will be partially based on the Apache Airavata software stack.

The project is a collaboration of Indiana University, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; Marlon Pierce, director of the IU Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center (CIRC), is principal investigator.

The term "science gateway" refers to a type of web-based interface designed to support scientific research, with an emphasis on supporting the entire scientific process from start to finish. Science gateways are built to help research communities use advanced cyberinfrastructures (for example, top-tier supercomputers, telescopes, electron microscopes, and curated data collections) to pursue common scientific goals, and provide means for researchers to easily share resources with collaborators throughout the nation. Science gateways have become integral to cutting-edge research, particularly in the fields of physics, medicine, and earthquake science.

Science gateways typically require considerable effort to create. By helping to teach developers effective methods of building open source environments, and providing them the middleware functionalities common to all science gateways, the SciGaP project will promote the broadened creation of custom interfaces and features that meet the particular needs of individual scientific communities. The project's ultimate goal is to be self-sustaining by the time the five-year NSF grant expires.

For more, see SciGaP.