Gateways for PIs

This section brings together information required by principal investigators (PIs) of ACCESS allocations to plan, organize, and oversee an ACCESS Science Gateway. Content on this page focuses on decision-making and management. For information on developing and operating a science gateway, see Science Gateways for Developers and Administrators.

Science gateways provide communities of users with simplified mechanisms for accessing scientific applications, tools, and data. By using ACCESS, gateway providers can obtain access to a wide range of computational resources professionally managed by ACCESS service providers. ACCESS resources may allow gateway providers to bring their applications and data to a wider community, to free up their own departmental or campus resources that have become overwhelmed by community usage, or to acquire access to fundamentally different systems than are available at their home institutions or through commercial cloud providers.

Are You Eligible?

ACCESS Science Gateways are community provided resources. PIs must have an active ACCESS allocation in order to provide a science gateway that leverages ACCESS resource providers. Eligibility of a PI for sponsoring an ACCESS Science Gateway is the same as for an ACCESS allocation; in brief, you must be a U.S. researcher, or collaborating with a U.S. researcher. For details on eligibility guidelines, see NSF Resource Allocations Policies: Eligibility. For more eligibility details please view the Allocations section. PIs should also take responsibility for managing renewals, supplements, and extensions for their gateway allocations to ensure continuous access to ACCESS resources.

Access Diverse Resources

ACCESS maintains a diverse set of resources through its constituent service providers. These include some of the largest academically operated supercomputers in the country, high throughput resources optimal for running large numbers of serial jobs, high memory and I/O optimized resources, storage-optimized resources, cloud computing resources, and hybrid CPU/co-processor machines. To support science gateways, ACCESS service providers offer both cloud computing resources and novel, hybrid clusters that support the direct hosting of gateways and other persistent services that are co-located with more conventional, batch scheduling clusters. Thus a gateway's web server, database and other services could be located at the PI's home institution and access ACCESS resources remotely, or it could run entirely in an ACCESS allocated academic cloud, or could it could run in a virtual machine or virtual cluster that has direct access to a co-located standard cluster with a shared file system for closer integration.

Participate in Workshops and Conferences

PIs and developers can participate in attendance at Gateway-related workshops and meetings and annual PEARC conferences to publicize their work and stay abreast of the current state of practice. Gateway- and ACCESS-related conferences are announced in SGCI User News.

Find Third Party Service Providers and Consultants

ACCESS provides infrastructure for its users, including gateways, but relies in large part on community-provided middleware. Thus, there are many ways to build gateways. The PI may choose an entirely do-it-yourself approach, especially if integrating an already successful gateway with ACCESS. At the other end of the spectrum, there a number of third party science gateway framework and middleware providers that the PI can work with to build the gateway; these may provide solutions for a wide range of of problems, including user management, integration with diverse ACCESS resources, data management, and so on. The PI can also choose a middle path, selecting services from third party providers for reliable high performance data movement and authentication. In addition to middleware services, the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) is an NSF-funded project that acts as an ACCESS Service Provider. The PI may work with the SGCI to develop additional aspects of the Science Gateway that go beyond the scope of ACCESS integration. The SGCI is also able to help the PI with complementary services such as sustainability planning.

Is a Science Gateway Right for Your Community?

Before taking the first steps to start building a gateway, PIs need to assess if a gateway will add value for their research communities. A number of factors may define the usefulness of a gateway or portal. For example, you may intend to grow your user community significantly, or you may intend to develop complex workflows for only a few advanced scientists, but provide them with tremendous capabilities. The expected size of your user community and the anticipated scientific impact should justify the investment in building a gateway.

Successful Gateway Examples

ACCESS supports a diverse set of science gateways, and more users run jobs on ACCESS-provided resources by using science gateways than by logging in. For a list of active ACCESS gateways with current allocations, see Science Gateways Listing. Note that ACCESS science gateways are community-provided. ACCESS does not preclude multiple gateways from supporting the same fields of research or even the same applications. Likewise, ACCESS is very interested in expanding the gateway community offerings to include fields not represented by the current listings.

Computational Expertise and Culture of Your Community

Lack of expertise or infrequency of use of high-performance computing (HPC) resources can present obstacles to researchers trying to accomplish their computational goals in a timely manner. Your research audience may not be familiar with the Unix command line or with the complexity of optimization parameters of analytical or domain-specific computational software. Field or bench researchers may spend months obtaining experimental or observational data and only a few weeks during a grant cycle analyzing their data on computational resources. Others may be accustomed to working only on local clusters. For any of these potential users, a portal may facilitate their computational objectives.

Data and Storage

A portal can meet the need to stage, store, and share large quantities of data or to bring data together from diverse storage systems.

Goals or Problems to Be Solved

Develop a clear idea of what, specifically, would constitute success in your gateway. Many of the qualitative criteria that you define to help you decide whether a gateway is the right solution for your community's needs may turn into quantitative success metrics later. This would also be something you describe in an allocation request for ACCESS resources. To learn more about success metrics, see the section below.

Role of ACCESS in Your Gateway

When evaluating whether to develop or extend a portal to connect to ACCESS resources, consider the advantages of using high-end resources, since extra labor is required for ACCESS integration. What scientific questions can be answered through the use of ACCESS resources that couldn't be answered otherwise? How do ACCESS capabilities add value to the scientific community? What specific bottlenecks or problems will be addressed through the use of ACCESS resources? Once you've decided to create a portal, answers to these questions will help your development team to design an effective gateway that meets the specific needs of the scientists who will use it.

Measuring the Success of Your Science Gateway

ACCESS measures its success through a number of metrics, including the number of users, the amount of resources requested and delivered, and the number of supported publications. It in turn asks its users, including science gateway providers, to help provide these metrics. It required that science gateway projects use scripts that count the users running jobs on ACCESS resources; see Gateways for Developers for more information. As a gateway provider, accurately measuring the impact of your gateway will assist in the justification for resources in allocation requests. Supported scientific publications are also important to track. Collecting publications supported by gateways is not required but highly encouraged; many successful gateways maintain their own databases of publications. ACCESS recommends that gateways adopt a simple citation and acknowledgement policy for publications by the gateway's users. This gives the gateway mechanisms for reliably and efficiently collecting this information.

PI Responsibilities

Once a PI obtains an ACCESS allocation for ACCESS resources, he or she can create and connect a gateway to ACCESS. Ultimately, it is the PI's responsibility to make sure that the gateway development team follows ACCESS requirements and practices. There are a few specific obligations defined below.

Obtain an Allocation and Monitor Usage

Using ACCESS resources requires an allocation; we recommend that PIs who are new to this process initially request an ACCESS allocation. Note also that the ACCESS gateway program staff are available to advise; contact them through the ACCESS Help Desk. One you have your allocation we provide instructions on how to establish, monitor, and manage your gateway allocation.

Report Usage Quarterly

Gateways must report the number of unique users who accessed ACCESS resources through the gateway each quarter. As described above, ACCESS provides scripts that automate this.

Display the ACCESS Logo

This logo will be make available soon after the ACCESS project enters active operation.

Cite ACCESS in Publications

Guidelines on acknowledging ACCESS allocations and citing ACCESS will be available shortly afer the ACCESS project is operational. Once available gateways should also encourage their users to use one of these mechanisms for citation.

Security and Accounting

PIs are responsible for securely operating their gateways and notifying ACCESS staff about any security incidents which have the potential to impact ACCESS. Proper accounting is required for fulfilling security and reporting requirements, as well as for justifying subsequent allocation renewals. Because the gateway maintains control of community accounts, the gateway PI must ensure that NSF computational resources are used in a manner consistent with the award and that reasonable attempts have been made and tools installed to ensure appropriate usage. This includes monitoring of all gateway usage by the community. \Our experience in working with gateways has led to a list of recommendations for best practices to adopt in the implementation and management of your gateway to ensure appropriate use. These recommended practices and a full listing of security and accounting requirements are outlined in the Gateways for Developers section. For community accounts, risks may be greater and usage patterns less certain, so additional information is required to help prevent security incidents. This information must be submitted before jobs can be run externally via community accounts. Additionally, ACCESS Service Providers may choose to impose their own limitations on community accounts through operating system tools, restricted shells or other means.