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computational resources. SG as de
ned here is a community-developed set of tools,
applications, and data that is integrated via a portal or a suite of applications that is
further customized to meet the needs of a targeted community in a web-based
graphical user interface. Access to advanced tools through SGs could potentially
signi
cantly increase the productivity of researchers.
The computational processes supported by SGs are organized as scienti
c
workflows that explicitly specify dependencies among underlying tasks for
orchestrating distributed resources (such as clusters, grids, or clouds) appropriately.
In this chapter we present the STARnet Gateway Federation (STARnet 2014), a
federation of A&A-oriented SGs designed and implemented to support the A&A
community and its speci
c needs. These gateways are based on WS-PGRADE/
gUSE technologies.
STARnet envisages sharing a set of services for authentication, a common and
distributed computing infrastructure, data archives and workflow repositories. Each
gateway provides access to specialized applications via customized workflows. The
first implementation of STARnet provides workflows for cosmological simulations,
data post-processing and scienti
c visualization. Those applications may run on
local or shared computing infrastructures thus guaranteeing resource availability,
and they can be shared between the different communities of the federation, pub-
lished worldwide for dissemination purposes, or even stored locally depending
upon the privacy policy of individual members of the federation. Users can then
execute these workflows in an interactive and user-friendly way by means of the
supplied web graphical user interfaces (portlets) equipped with customized gUSE
ASM API to manage them.
18.2 STARnet Science Gateways
The
first set of core A&A communities belonging to the STARnet Federation is
specialized on scienti
c visualization, cosmological simulation, stellar evolution
and, comet and meteoroid dynamical evolution. Their applications were developed
and maintained on these core sites:
INAF Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Italy (OACT) developed the
VisIVO Science Gateway as a workflow-enabled portal providing visualization
and data management services to the scienti
c community by means of an easy-
to-use graphical environment (Chap.
13
).
University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom (UoP) supports the federation with a
science gateway for the Large Simulation for Modi
ed Gravity (LaSMoG)
consortium to investigate large-scale modi
ed gravity models (Sect.
18.4.1
).
INAF Astronomical Observatory of Teramo, Italy (OATE) aims at supporting
the community of stellar evolutionary simulations with a science gateway that
accesses numerical code for stellar model computations (Sect.
18.4.2
).
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