This talk gives an overview on enhancing the sustainability of science gateways via on-campus teams. It goes into detail for success stories, available funding mechanisms and suggests a roadmap for universities aiming at building centralized on-campus teams.

1. Award Number
ACI-1547611
Webinar for Campus Champions
Science Gateways:
Sustainability via
On-Campus Teams

2. Overview
• Motivation
• Gateways as increasingly common component of funded activities by many
agencies
• Successful gateways can bring an institution great visibility
• Survey results
• Expertise involved in creating efficiently science gateways
• Evidence that on-campus teams contribute to sustainability
• Opportunities
• ND example
• Funding mechanisms for on-campus teams
• External resources from SGCI services to contractors
• Campus resources from central funding to re-charge models
• Suggestion for roadmap on creating on-campus teams
• Evangelists
• Main steps
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3. Science Gateways
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• Increased complexity of
• today’s research questions
• hardware and software
• skills required
• Greater need for openness
and reproducibility
• Science increasingly driving
policy questions
• Opportunity to integrate
research with teaching
• Better workforce preparation
We need end-to-end
solutions that
provide
broad access to
advanced resources
and
allow all to tackle
today’s challenging
science questions.

4. 4

5. Science Gateways Survey 2014
5
• 29,000-person survey
• 4957 responses from across domains

6. Science Gateways Survey 2014
6
What services
would be helpful?

7. Science Gateways Survey 2014
7
34% 36%
20%
17%
31%
26%
42%
16%
30%
18%
45% 44%
14% 15%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
Usability
Consultant
Graphic
Designer
Community
Liaison/
Evangelist
Project
Manager
Professional
Software
Developer
Security
Expert
Quality
Assurance
and
Testing
Expert
Wished
we
had
this
Yes,
we
had
this
Well-designed gateways require a variety of
expertise

8. Opportunities
• A breadth of interesting topics in the science
gateway creation process
• Novel frameworks and web applications
• Inter- and multidisciplinary work
• Contributing to grand challenges, e.g., Malaria
eradication
• …
• A breadth of interesting roles
• Designers, statisticians, librarians, machine learning
experts, usability experts,…
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9. Challenges
• Some topics and roles are only needed for part
of the project
⇒ Not fully funded positions via one project
⇒ For diverse expertise, several different people
are needed
(No “egg-laying,
milk-bearing woolly sow”)
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10. Typical Lifecycle of a Science Gateway
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Early
adopters
Publicity
Wider
adoption
Funding
ends
Scientists
disillusioned
New
project
prototype

11. Sustainability via On-Campus Teams
• Centralized teams collaborating with diverse
researchers and research teams
• Synergy effects between projects
• Experts for the diversity of topics
• Lower learning curves
• Researchers and PhD students can focus on
their research
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12. Success Stories
Many universities have successful centers/groups
with centralized services for science gateways
• Center for Research Computing at University of
Notre Dame
• HubZero Team at Purdue University
• Science Gateways Research Center at Indiana
University
• Science Gateway Group at TACC at the
University of Texas, Austin
• …
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13. ND CRC in 2006-2008
• Effort with 7 FTEs centrally funded
• HTC and HPC Computing and basic user support
• One centrally funded cluster plus multiple faculty funded clusters in
various cabinets on campus
• Around 300 active users
• 80% centrally funded hardware
• No other kinds of research computing services
• Underserved social sciences and humanities for their need
on science gateways
• ~1000 faculty, ~12000 students
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14. ND CRC Mission
CRC engages in computational science, fosters
multidisciplinary research and provides advanced
computational tools and services. The CRC works
to facilitate discoveries across science,
engineering, the arts and humanities, social
sciences, business and other disciplines.
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15. ND CRC Vision
To become an internationally recognized
multidisciplinary research computing center based
upon our reputation for facilitating and accelerating
discovery through effective and novel applications
of cyberinfrastructure.
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16. ND CRC Director’s thoughts on Vision
• “Nice vision, but how we get there?”
• “What should we do first?”
• “Users should tell us what they need…”
• “HPC works fine, so let’s focus on CI Development…”
• “We need portals and other collaborative environments”
• “We need good user support, and good, straight
resource usage policies”
• “We need CI and HPC teams working together”
• “How do we fund all these with very limited resources?”
• “What is available out there?
• And so on…
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17. Implementation by Jarek Nabrzyski
Take the risk and hire people first
è train people
è generate / bring projects
è assign people to projects and focus on getting
more projects and more people -> etc...
è if not successful then exit, i.e. quit J
Fortunately, we had many projects, mostly science
gateway projects of various kinds and difficulty.
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18. ND CRC in 2017
• 45 FTEs with 70% of the staff salaries supported through
grants and services
• HTC and HPC Computing and user support
• 26,000 cores
• 1,800 active users
• 10 HPC engineers and user support staff
• 30% of compute nodes are centrally funded
• Cyberinfrastructure development
• ~15-20 CI projects each year with ~35 faculty from various
departments including social sciences and humanities
• supported by ~15 research programmers, ~8 computational
scientists, some FTE fractions of HPC engineers, and a few (7) grad
students and undergraduate interns (4-6)
• ~1000 faculty, ~12000 students
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19. Funding Mechanisms – External Resources
Get support from SGCI via diverse services
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20. Funding Mechanisms – External Resources
• Get support from SGCI via diverse services
• Contractors from mature science gateway
frameworks
⇒ Means to create and/or maintain science
gateway(s) successfully while working on
building up internal resources
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21. Funding Mechanisms – Internal Resources
• Funding via involvement of some person months
in grants
• Funding on some hard money from universities
• Funding via re-charge
• Funding via NSF for building cyberpractitioner
career-paths (under development - models like
full funding the first year and increasing
responsibility on the side of universities)
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22. Suggestion for Roadmap
• Identify existing science gateway projects on campus and
contact PIs and/or developers
• Identify evangelist who can push and is enthusiastic
about the opportunity for creating on-campus teams –
maybe YOU?
• Contact decision makers/funding providers on campus
• Use external resources for creating/maintaining science
gateways
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23. Suggestion for Roadmap
• Extend centralized IT/HPC teams via computational
scientists and programmers or create new team
• Computational Scientists support
• Designing science gateways
• Visualization
• Collaborating on proposals
• …
• Programmers with diverse foci
• Backend
• Frontend
• Usability
• Workflows
• …
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24. Suggestion for Roadmap
• Student internships/fellowships for
undergraduate and graduate level
• Classes at universities (e.g., Class on Science
Gateways at Indiana University)
• Webinars
• Close collaboration with on-campus faculty
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25. Suggestion for Roadmap
• Keep the on-campus group sustainable and
maintain and/or grow it
=> A mixture of internal and external resources,
funding possibilities and outreach to on-campus
faculty
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26. Thanks for your attention!
help@sciencegateways.org
http://sciencegateways.org/
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