CI CoE: SGX3 - A Center of Excellence to Extend Access, Expand the Community, and Exemplify Good Practices for CI Through Science Gateways

The SGX3 project enhances the creation, use, and ongoing sustainability of science gateways and the science gateway community. A science gateway is a web-based platform that allows large audiences of researchers, educators, students, and the public to access complex, expensive resources such as supercomputers, scientific instruments, and large data sets, as well as to collaborate together as a community.

Often these resources are difficult to access natively and require a high degree of computer programming skill. While researchers and educators may have significant knowledge in their scientific areas, they mostly lack such programming skills. Science gateways enable researchers to focus on their science questions by making computational methods and complex research infrastructure easier to use.

With science gateways, the number of people who can participate in making scientific advances and educating the future science and technology workforce is vastly increased and diversified. Consequently, science gateways are a key element in increasing the nation’s competitiveness in science and technology.

Science gateways are challenged to sustain their operations for many reasons, including inadequate software engineering practices, reinvention of existing technologies, inability to transition from a research project to a production service, lack of partnering with other gateways and community members who may add high-profile content to the gateway, staff turnover, and poor usability. Further, science gateways must also pivot to fulfill new scientific needs that continually arise through, for example, newly funded large computing infrastructures, advances in artificial intelligence, needs for resources to be findable and accessible by the community, the physical separation of data from compute resources, regulated data requirements, and the availability of novel or specialized computing resources.

SGX3 achieves its goals of increasing science gateway use and sustainability by offering a suite of services to help the scientific community with these issues. SGX3 is composed of expert practitioners, each of whom has been working in the field of science gateways for many years. The services include i) technology design and selection to help researchers building science gateways to do so without reinventing existing technologies; ii) user experience design to ensure that science gateways offer the lowest possible barrier to their users; iii) educational services to train science gateway professionals on sustainability and good practices for software engineering; iv) workforce development to train faculty about science gateways and thus students to become science gateway developers; v) outreach activities and a conference series to catalyze the science gateway community; and vi) forward looking activities to develop roadmaps that address the next generation of upcoming science gateway technology advances necessary to support new areas of science and engineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.