Rapid Prototyping of Science Gateways in the Brazilian National HPC Network

Arguably, an important amount of scientific software development time is likely to be employed on user interfaces. In particular, science gateways have gained increasing interest from the e-Science community because of their convenience to hide the complexity of the underlying resources that give support to the management of scientific data and to the execution of scientific applications. Based on our previous experience with the development of science gateways for diverse application domains in the Brazilian National HPC Network (SINAPAD), we have devised a rapid prototyping strategy to lower the barrier for scientific application developers to launch new science gateways. In this paper we present such strategy, which is based on two main tools. The first tool implements a gateway engine that can be configured by a small set of XML files. Such files completely define the desired functionality of an specific science gateway in such an engine. The gateway engine also offers other features not commonly found in related technologies, such as file sharing, data provenance tracking, and restricted anonymous access to underlying computational resources. The second tool implements both an editor and a packager for the aforementioned engine, allowing the developer to rapidly deploy and launch a new science gateway in ordinary Web application containers. In this paper we present our results with the use of both tools in the SINAPAD network. We also discuss about the current limitations of such tools, as well as how we have been dealing with such limitations to provide a more comprehensive toolset to developers.