Science Gateways in the Cloud, a Platform for Providing Modern Scientific Workflows for Reproducible Research and Collaboration

The advent and maturity of cloud computing technologies and tools have opened new avenues for addressing both Big Data and Open Science challenges to accelerate scientific discoveries. There is broad consensus that as data volumes grow rapidly, it is particularly important to reduce data movement and bring processing and computations to the data. Data providers also need to give scientists an ecosystem that includes data, tools, workflows and other end-to-end applications and services needed to perform analysis, integration, interpretation, and synthesis - all in the same environment or platform. Instead of moving data to processing systems near users, as is the tradition, one will need to bring processing, computing, analysis and visualization to data – so called data-proximate workbench capabilities, also known as server-side processing. Cloud-based Science Gateways, through online portals and user-friendly interfaces, provide access to a range of resources that are of interest to a community of researchers, educators, and students, including datasets, tools, services, and workspaces. These offerings permit researchers to access a suite of capabilities to not only achieve reproducible science in a web-based workspace but also provide a platform for collaboration and conducting team science. In this session, speakers will present on-going efforts to develop cloud-based Science Gateways to facilitate end-to-end scientific workflows for communities of researchers, educators, and students in the geosciences.