Abstract
Science gateways are an integral component of modern collaborative research. They find widespread adoption by research groups to share data, code and tools both amongst collaborators on a project and the broader community. However, not unlike research groups, gateways too, face the vagaries of research funding often resulting in a bleak outlook for their maintenance beyond the original project's conclusion. We present a sustainability model based on the HUBzero cyberinfrastructure platform that enables multiple research projects to share a single science gateway allowing for their maintenance even after the original funding source has run out. This model brings with it certain other advantages as well; general improvements to the gateway apply to all hosted projects, similar requirements across projects can often be abstracted into new general purpose capabilities for the gateway which feed back into all hosted projects. Such newly developed capabilities can also foster additional research aiding in new funding proposals that can revitalize and jumpstart hosted dormant projects. We describe a specific instance of a HUBzero science gateway, MyGeoHub, that successfully employs this sustainability model to host several geospatial research projects. We also illustrate the specific advantages of this sustainability model in the case of the MyGeoHub gateway that have led to the development of general-purpose data management and visualization software modules that have found use beyond MyGeoHub.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 820-832 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Future Generation Computer Systems |
| Volume | 94 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2019 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
WaterHub was funded by the NSF CI-TEAM program. Its goal was to connect the hydrology community through sharing of hydrologic information, data, models, simulation tools, and connecting to high performance computing (HPC) resources. The project also emphasizes enabling teaching and learning real world hydrological modeling inside classroom settings. The main tool offered on WaterHub, i.e., SWATShare provides a comprehensive online environment for sharing, executing, and visualizing Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) [ 8 ] models. The researchers subsequently sought enhancements to WaterHub so that (1) it can interoperate with another major hydrological data/model repository HydroShare [ 9 ] so that researchers from that system can directly launch SWATShare to analyze their data in HydroShare and researchers from WaterHub can import model resources from or publish model output to HydroShare, leveraging its data management functions; and (2) the output of SWAT models generated by SWATShare can be connected to other online tools for investigation on different science questions. For example, integrate the streamflow output from SWAT with the output from LISFLOOD-FP [ 10 ] hydrodynamic model to enable visualization of hydrographs and flood extents. Such interoperation and simple workflow functionality was either hard to develop by researchers or not supported at the time. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, United States grant number 1261727 .
Keywords
- Cyberinfrastructure
- Geospatial
- Science gateways
- Sustainability