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Published on Thursday, 20 May 2021 03:35

SGCI Tech Summit

During its third year of operation, the SGCI initiated an activity called the Tech Summit to begin addressing future needs for science gateways. A flagship SGCI Tech Summit project on interoperability was undertaken to make it easier for science gateways and gateway framework technologies to utilize the vast amount of advanced cyberinfrastructure deployed across the US and internationally, and to improve interoperability between these gateway technologies, as described in more detail below. Following this activity, and with the funding of the SGX3 Center of Excellence, the Tech Summit activity has been formalized going forward as a series of Blueprint Factories.

Common Resource Descriptions for Interoperable Gateway Infrastructure

The Common Resource Descriptions for Interoperable Gateway Infrastructure Tech Summit project provides a common formal language or vocabulary (called a "specification") for defining a cyberinfrastructure resource—a storage or computing system where gateways can save data or execute codes, respectively—as well as an inventory system that can be used by gateways to automatically learn about the cyberinfrastructure that is available. Additionally, when two gateway technologies adopt the Common Resource Descriptions Specification, they are automatically able to communicate details with each other about where datasets were saved or how a job was run. This leads to interoperability across the gateways.

Version 1.0 of the SGCI Resource Description Language was released and a fully-compliant web-friendly API implemented and hosted by the XSEDE project was deployed. Since then, the core team identified a transition and sustainment plan for the XSEDE API to the ACCESS project and defined a set of improvements that would constitute a 1.1 release and simplify adoption by major projects such as Open OnDemand and Tapis. Once this release is finalized, updates to the ACCESS API (previously XSEDE) and integrations into existing frameworks will be made.

We invite the community to participate in this project and welcome any feedback! 

We have complete documentation on ReadTheDocs here, and you can find the official project repository on GitHub here. We are using the tools available in GitHub to track issues and pull requests from the community, and we will hold monthly meetings to review all outstanding proposed changes.