MyGeoHub Science Gateway for Spatial Data and a Model for Sustainability

Science gateways have gained popularity and adoption in the past few years as an efficient and user friendly way to share scientific data, models, tools, and workflows in a community. However, all science gateways face a major hurdle of sustainability in the long term. When funding ends, the gateway developed for the project is likely to become obsolete due to non-trivial maintenance costs. We describe here a cost-sharing solution based on the HUBzero gateway framework. Instead of dedicating one hub for each project, this solution hosts multiple projects with synergies on one physical hub while at the same time providing branded individual web space for each project by leveraging HUBzero’s support of super groups. This reduces the cost in maintaining the underlying infrastructure, which is further shared among multiple projects, keeping the hosted gateways alive in the long term. We applied this model to MyGeoHub and will discuss our implementation experience.