SciGaP: Apache Airavata Hosted Science GatewaysMarlon Pierce

Science Gateways Research Center,Pervasive Technology Institute,

Indiana Universitymarpierc@iu.edu

Suresh MarruScience Gateways Research Center,Pervasive Technology Institute,

Indiana Universitysmarru@iu.edu

Eroma AbeysingheScience Gateways Research Center,Pervasive Technology Institute,

Indiana University

Sudhakar PamidighantamScience Gateways Research Center,Pervasive Technology Institute,

Indiana University

Marcus ChristieScience Gateways Research Center,Pervasive Technology Institute,

Indiana University

Dimuthu WannipurageScience Gateways Research Center,Pervasive Technology Institute,

Indiana University

ABSTRACTThe Science Gateways Platform as a service (SciGaP.org) projectprovides a rapid development and stable hosting platform for awide range of science gateways that focus on software as a service.Based on the open source Apache Airavata project, SciGaP servicesinclude user management, workflow execution management, com-putational experiment archiving and access, and sharing servicesthat allow users to share results and other digital artifacts. SciGaPservices are multi-tenanted, with clients accessing services througha well-defined, programming language-independent API. SciGaPservices can be integrated into web, mobile, and desktop clients.To simplify development for new clients, SciGaP includes the PGA,a generic PHP-based gateway client for SciGaP services that alsoacts as a reference implementation of the API. Several examplegateways using these services are summarized.

CCS CONCEPTS• Information systems→ Information systems applications;

KEYWORDSScience gateways, software as a service, cyberinfrastructureACM Reference Format:Marlon Pierce, Suresh Marru, Eroma Abeysinghe, Sudhakar Pamidighan-tam, Marcus Christie, and Dimuthu Wannipurage. 2018. SciGaP: ApacheAiravata Hosted Science Gateways. In Proceedings of The International Con-ference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis(CS’18).ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn

1 INTRODUCTIONSince the Science Gateways Platform as a service (SciGaP.org)project’s start in 2013, it has been used to build and host over thirtyscience gateways. Hosted gateways include campus gateways that

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACMmust be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or afee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.CS’18, November 2018, Dallas, TX, USA© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM.https://doi.org/10.1145/nnnnnnn.nnnnnnn

Figure 1: SciGaP services provide gateways that connect soft-ware and resource providers with communities.

provide cyberinfrastructure for university computing facilities, do-main gateways that target a particular field of science, and sciencegateways that provide “software as a service” for scientific applica-tions, whose developers seek to make their software available to alarger audience without going through the traditional packaging,release, and support cycles for downloadable software. Supportingeducation and classroom usage as well as research is an impor-tant goal for all types of gateways. Figure 1 shows a conceptualrepresentation of SciGaP.

SciGaP services support these gateways through a single, scal-able, hosted version of the Apache Airavata software system [3] [7]that supports multiple tenants simultaneously and connects themto multiple backend computing and storage resources. Apache Aira-vata services include scientific application execution managementon HPC and cloud environments, input and output data staging,and provenance tracking for user-created computational experi-ments. The latter can be searched and shared with colleagues andgroups through fine-grained mechanisms [5]. Apache Airavata alsoexposes a rich set of services for gateway administrators, allowingthem to manage metadata about computing resources and scientificapplications that power their gateways. All SciGaP services areexposed through a programming language-independent API [6].Each tenant’s users are authenticated through a multi-tenantedidentity management system [4] based on Keycloak [1] that can beintegrated with a wide range of Web and desktop clients. Figure 2depicts the SciGaP ecosystem.

1

CS’18, November 2018, Dallas, TX, USA M. Pierce, et al.

Figure 2: Based on Apache Airavata, SciGaP services providemulti-tenanted hosting and integration with diverse com-puting and storage resources.

To quickly onboard new gateways so that they can make use ofthese services, we provide a hosted, PHP-based reference imple-mentation gateway for the API, which we call the PGA. Developerswho need additional functionality can modify the PGA, or they candevelop completely new interfaces using the API. Current clientsuse all of these approaches. We provide examples of SciGaP hostedgateways covering many different use cases, scientific applications,and computing resources in Section 4.

2 SCIGAP SERVICES AND FEATURESSciGaP services, including Apache Airavata, supporting servicessuch as RabbitMQ and Zookeeper, and PGA-based tenants arehosted on Indiana University’s Intelligent Infrastructure hostingenvironment. SciGaP hosts, manages, and provides storage for itsgateway tenants.

All gateway clients get an instance of the PGA, which they canuse to configure and manage their gateway tenant. Configurationincludes making backend computing and storage resources avail-able through the gateway to the gateway users, and providingprescriptive metadata about software applications that the gatewaywill provide. These are used to generate form-based user interfacesand to create queue submission scripts that are submitted to remoteresources.

SciGaP manages communications with remote resources usinga secure set of public-private keys [2]. Gateways may allow usersto submit jobs to community accounts (such as used by XSEDE)or to individual accounts. Gateway tenants are also configuredto use authentication mechanisms chosen by the client; these areusually campus-based authenticationmechanisms accessed throughCILogon.

3 EXAMPLE SCIGAP GATEWAYSSciGaP supports client gateways in a number of different fields. Wehighlight the following recent collaborations.

dREG, developed in collaboration with Charles Danko’s labora-tory at Cornell University, provides a software-as-a-service gatewaythat efficiently delivers the developers’ bioinformatics applicationon XSEDE resources. dREG uses a customized version of the PGAhosted on Jetstream that integrates additional visualization inter-faces. dREG integration with XSEDE was supported by XSEDE’sExtended Collaborative Support Services.

The University of South Dakota Campus Gateway gives its userssimplified access to a range of popular scientific applications in-stalled on campus clusters at the University of South Dakota. Usersauthenticate with campus identities and can access resources eitherthrough personal or group accounts. This gateway was supportedby the Extended Developer Support service from the Science Gate-ways Community Institute (SGCI).

SimCCS is a gateway to help carbon capture and sequestrationplanners and decision makers evaluate different sequestration op-tions associated with specific power generation facilities. SimCCSprovides both Web and Desktop clients for users. SimCCS is devel-oped with the Indiana Geological and Water Survey through theScience Gateways Community Institute.

The SimVascular Gateway is a software-as-a-service gatewayused to deliver SimVascular’s flow solver software for modelingblood flow simulation to classroom users at multiple universities.This gateway is developed in collaboration with the SimVascu-lar.org team (Prof. Alison Marsden, Principal Investigator). TheSimVascular Gateway uses XSEDE’s Comet and is supported byXSEDE ECSS.

The Computational Systems Biology Group at Louisiana StateUniversity uses SciGaP services to provide a gateway to severaldifferent in-house developed systems biology tools that run on LSUclusters. This gateway is supported by SGCI developer services.

4 CONCLUSIONSciGaP services have been used to run a wide range of gatewaytenants, ranging from individual faculty members who wish todeliver their scientific software to a broader audience of users in ascalable way that keeps user support efforts manageable, to com-puting center resource providers who want to make their systemsmore accessible and simpler to use.

Clients to SciGaP services may use the PGA, lightly branded butotherwise “as is” and hosted by the SciGaP team, for their gateway,they may make significant modifications to the PGA code, or theymay use a different client entirely. SciGaP’s API and security modelenables these different modes of usage; it is also possible to integrateexisting gateways with SciGaP services.

Likewise, SciGaP services can interact with numerous backendresources, queuing systems, and storage, including XSEDE and cam-pus resources. To date, SciGaP has integrated over thirty backendsystems into its central platform at the request of client gateways.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSDevelopment of the SciGaP platform and Apache Airavata middle-ware is supported by NSF Award 1339774.

REFERENCES[1] Marcus A Christie, Anuj Bhandar, Supun Nakandala, Suresh Marru, Eroma

Abeysinghe, Sudhakar Pamidighantam, and Marlon E Pierce. 2017. Using Keycloak2

SciGaP: Apache Airavata Hosted Science Gateways CS’18, November 2018, Dallas, TX, USA

for Gateway Authentication and Authorization. (2017).[2] Thejaka Amila Kanewala, Suresh Marru, Jim Basney, and Marlon Pierce. 2014.

A credential store for multi-tenant science gateways. In Cluster, Cloud and GridComputing (CCGrid), 2014 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on. IEEE, 445–454.

[3] SureshMarru, Lahiru Gunathilake, Chathura Herath, Patanachai Tangchaisin, Mar-lon Pierce, Chris Mattmann, Raminder Singh, Thilina Gunarathne, Eran Chinthaka,Ross Gardler, et al. 2011. Apache airavata: a framework for distributed applica-tions and computational workflows. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM workshop onGateway computing environments. ACM, 21–28.

[4] Supun Nakandala, Hasini Gunasinghe, Suresh Marru, and Marlon Pierce. 2016.Apache Airavata security manager: Authentication and authorization implemen-tations for a multi-tenant escience framework. In e-Science (e-Science), 2016 IEEE12th International Conference on. IEEE, 287–292.

[5] Supun Nakandala, Suresh Marru, Marlon Piece, Sudhakar Pamidighantam, Ken-neth Yoshimoto, Terri Schwartz, Subhashini Sivagnanam, Amit Majumdar, andMark A Miller. 2017. Apache Airavata Sharing Service: A Tool for Enabling UserCollaboration in Science Gateways. In Proceedings of the Practice and Experiencein Advanced Research Computing 2017 on Sustainability, Success and Impact. ACM,20.

[6] Marlon Pierce, Suresh Marru, Borries Demeler, Raminderjeet Singh, and GaryGorbet. 2014. The apache airavata application programming interface: overviewand evaluation with the UltraScan science gateway. In Gateway Computing Envi-ronments Workshop (GCE), 2014 9th. IEEE, 25–29.

[7] Marlon E Pierce, SureshMarru, Lahiru Gunathilake, DonKushanWijeratne, Ramin-der Singh, Chathuri Wimalasena, Shameera Ratnayaka, and Sudhakar Pamidighan-tam. 2015. Apache Airavata: design and directions of a science gateway framework.Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 27, 16 (2015), 4282–4291.

3