8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016)

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

Science gateways are key to the utilization of the science infrastructure and instruments for wider audiences because they provide a customized and intuitive user interface. Hence they are critical components in enabling NSF's science mission. Essentially, science gateways are a community-specific set of tools, applications, and data collections that are integrated together via a web portal or a desktop application, providing access to resources and services for distributed data, distributed computing and instruments, so that the complexity of the underlying infrastructure can be completely hidden from the users. Since the challenges for science gateways are many-fold and interdisciplinary, and there is considerable international activity around gateways, it is crucial to bring together users, science gateway developers and science gateway providers from across the world to share learnings and best practices. IWSG 2016 is the 8th workshop of the successful annual workshop series IWSG (International Workshop on Science Gateways), an interdisciplinary workshop series located in Europe that brings together these three groups and addresses various scientific domains, e.g. life sciences, biomedical research, chemistry, physics. It forms an international platform for discussing problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, to shape future directions for research, foster the exchange of ideas, standards and common requirements and push towards the wider adoption of science gateways in e-Science. Visionary keynote speakers have been chosen for IWSG 2016 with the intention of exposing workshop participants to science gateway achievements to present their fresh views and visions on the evolution and future of science gateways. Besides the keynotes, IWSG 2016 features talks, lightning talks, and demonstration sessions selected from submissions in a peer-review process. Submission of a full paper may result in a talk, submission of an abstract may result in a lightning talk or a demonstration. A key element of this workshop is that the resulting abstracts and talks will be made publicly available on the website, open-access proceedings will be published in an indexed online journal. Open-access indexed articles will attract more participants and will reach a wider community. Additionally, IWSG 2016 partners with the US and Australasian workshop series on science gateways. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit a significantly extended paper to a special issue jointly organized by the three workshops. The talks, discussions and publications will provide a thorough view on science gateways and corresponding technologies while setting the stage for more intercontinental collaborations. New technologies, simulations and experimental methods such as next-gen sequencing or the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) telescopes have enabled researchers to create huge amounts of data in extremely short times. The demand for compute power and storage is met with a rise in provision of distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs), such as grid and cloud infrastructures. Despite the increasing availability of resources, neither the broad uptake of these facilities and infrastructures nor the seamless integration of instruments creating data are following the same pace. The main reasons for this lie in the complexity of the human interface to these infrastructures and instruments. Science gateways tackle this problem and offer easy and intuitive access to computing infrastructures and instruments irrespective of their location. Since the challenges for science gateways are many-fold and interdisciplinary, and there is considerable international activity around gateways, it is crucial to bring together users, science gateway developers and science gateway providers from across the world to share learning and best practices. The IWSG workshop series taking place each year at a different European city has attracted between 30 and 65 participants in the last years. The workshop and the workshop series in general make a significant contribution to the research in the area of science gateways. The output and discussions at IWSG 2016 will reflect the current international standard in the area of science gateways, enable research groups attain novel capabilities in the area of scientific data management, collaboration and computing and enabled research groups attain standard of international excellence by using a peer-review system to select the best papers and abstracts only. The workshop aids in the creation of resources in the form of novel approaches for the delivery and use of science gateways that will facilitate a wider uptake of distributed and parallel methods. The partnership with the US and Australian workshop series and the joint special issue enlarges the outreach further to intercontinental level.