Cloud-enabling a collaborative research platform: The gabbs story

Modern cyberinfrastructures typically involve tightly integrated compute, storage and web application resources. They also form the basis of science gateways, which add their own science-specific processing or visualization capabilities. While some science gateways are intended as the central resource provider for a certain scientific community, others provide generic capabilities that are intended for further customization at each installation site. However, replicating their setup is a non-Trivial task often involving specific operating system, software package and configuration choices while also requiring allocation of the actual physical computing resources. Cloud computing provides an attractive alternative, simplifying resource provision and enabling reliable replication. We describe our ongoing efforts to cloud-enable a geospatial science gateway hosting general-purpose software building blocks termed GABBs, that provide geospatial data management, analysis, visualization and processing capabilities. We describe the various compute and storage resources and software underlying these building blocks and our automation of the deployment, software installation and configuration of this science gateway on the AmazonWeb Services (AWS) cloud platform. Some of the challenges that were encountered and resolved during this cloud-enabling process are also described.