Conclusions and Outlook - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 277

According to the google map at SourceForge, more than 90 WS-PGRADE-
based gateway services have been installed worldwide. Many of them provide
production service for various user communities. It is dif

cult to estimate the
number of end-users of these gateways since some of the gateways support several
hundreds of users, while others support only 20 30 users. Nevertheless, the overall

impact of these gateways is very large compared to other gateway frameworks. This
large set of user communities guarantees the sustainability of the SCI-BUS
technology even after SCI-BUS is completed. Some new EU projects (CloudSME
( http://cloudsme.eu/ ) and VIALACTEA) also use and will actively further develop
WS-PGRADE/gUSE for another two years, explicitly providing

-

financial funding
to maintain and further develop the gateway framework technology.

Further Developments of WS-PGRADE/gUSE

According to the feedbacks of the user communities, the most important further
developments of WS-PGRADE/gUSE will include the following topics:

1. Further improving robustness and reducing the number of bugs. While back in
2011 and 2012 the most important task was to extend the framework with new
capabilities and functionalities, since September 2013 one of the highest priority
tasks of the gUSE team has been

fixing the bugs in the code based on the bug
reports from the community. As a result, all the major bugs have been xed and

a large number of less-important bugs were also removed from the framework.
This effort proved to be successful, and our users grow more and more satis

ed.

2. Work ow provenance. Several communities (e.g., the DRIHM and VERCE

projects) have asked to extend WS-PGRADE/gUSE with support for work ow

provenance. As an answer to this request a joint task force was created between
the SCI-BUS and ER-Flow projects involving researchers from the Taverna
team as well. A preliminary integration of the gUSE logging system with
PROVMan developed in Amsterdam Medical Center has been already created,
and we plan to accelerate this activity in the near future.
3. DCI Bridge XSEDE extension. Several communities (e.g., the DRIHM project
and the CMMST community) asked for a new DCI Bridge plugin that enables
access to XSEDE grid resources. This work has been started and is expected to
be completed by summer 2014.
4. Data Avenue work ow integration. The Data Avenue service integration into

work ow activities is a very much required extension of WS-PGRADE/gUSE.

The first steps have been taken and a prototype version of this integration soon

will be further developed at the production level. Users of the DRIHM and ER-
Flow projects already eagerly await this release. Additionally, the EUDAT
project in collaboration with ER-Flow considers this approach as a possible
means in their future solutions.