Science gateways workshop to be held in conjunction with GGF14

released May 17, 2005

A workshop on "Science Gateways: Common Community Interfaces to Grid Resources" will be held in conjunction with Global Grid Forum 14 (GGF14), to be held June 26-29 in Chicago. The science gateways workshop is being organized by the GGF Steering Group Community Council, the TeraGrid project, the HPC-Europa project, and PRAGMA.

Increasingly, scientists are using portals and desktop applications as "gateways" to access computation, information and even instruments that are integrated within Grid systems. A "science gateway" is a community-specific set of tools, applications, and data collections that are integrated via a portal or a suite of applications, providing access to Grid-integrated resources. These gateways often support orchestrated workflow, resource directories (databases, compute resources, etc.), and execution services. As more and more communities build science gateways, it will be useful to develop a set of conventions—policies, technical approaches, interactions—by which a science gateway interacts with a Grid or with a Grid resource.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together researchers and resource providers who are trying to bring or have brought Grid capabilities to a particular science community (atmospheric scientists, chemists, bioinformaticists, etc.), and who are doing this by:

• building portals
• implementing Web services on resources in operational grids
• building applications with "embedded" capabilities to access Grids
• (or Grid resources) from the desktop

The workshop will explore and summarize commonalities and differences among development approaches and technologies used as well as system, security, accounting, authentication/authorization and other policies and capabilities that need to be in place to support these interfaces on production grids.

The organizers are seeking brief position papers that cover the following topics:

• Description of services provided by the interface and technologies/software used to provide them
• Description of specific configuration or policy issues encountered during deployment and maintenance of these interfaces
• Authentication and authorization approaches to allow a variety of user "types" ranging from fully authenticated to anonymous users of restricted access such as running a tool on a Grid resource from a portal interface
• Practical issues related to supporting workflow on Grid resources
• Approaches to providing Web services on a secure system, including mechanisms and techniques for enabling gateway developers to manage and provide applications on computational resources for execution as Web services

Papers should be typeset in a single-column format, in 12pt font, for letter or A4 sized paper. Papers should not exceed five (5) pages. Submission format is PDF. Please submit your paper to sgw-ggf@purdue.edu marked as GGF-14 Science Gateway workshop submission. Submissions must be received by May 23.

 

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