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Experiences of the Brazilian national high‐performance computing network on the rapid prototyping of science gateways
Author(s) -
Gomes Antonio Tadeu A.,
Bastos Bruno F.,
Medeiros Vivian,
Moreira Vinicius M.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.3258
Subject(s) - gateway (web page) , computer science , xml , world wide web , software , internetworking , default gateway , software engineering , the internet , operating system , computer network
Summary Arguably, an important amount of scientific software development time is likely to be employed on user interfaces. In particular, science gateways have gained increasing interest from the e‐Science community. These gateways allow hiding the complexity of the underlying resources that give support to the management of scientific data and to the execution of scientific applications. Based on our previous experience with the development of science gateways for diverse application domains in the Brazilian national high‐performance computing network (SINAPAD), we have devised a rapid prototyping strategy to lower the barrier for scientific application developers to launch new science gateways. This strategy is based on two main tools. The first tool implements a gateway engine that can be configured by a small set of XML files. Such files completely define the desired functionality of a specific science gateway in the gateway engine. The gateway engine also offers other features not commonly found in related technologies, such as file sharing, data provenance tracking, and restricted anonymous access to underlying computational resources. The second tool implements both an editor and a packager for the aforementioned engine. This tool allows the developer to rapidly deploy and launch a new science gateway in ordinary Web application containers. In this paper, we present our results with the use of both tools in the SINAPAD network. We also discuss about the current limitations of both tools, as well as how we have been dealing with such limitations to provide a more comprehensive toolset to developers. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.