Conclusions and Outlook - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 279

enhanced with some speci ows and portlets that are needed for the sub-

community they primarily serve. Community users can enter any of these gateways
through a uniform identi

c work

cation service so all the gateways be-longing to the
gateway alliance are available for every community member. Be-yond the common
user identi cation service, some other common services can al-so be established and

used by all the gateways and users. For example, in the StarNet alliance the cloud
storage facility is such a common service. This is a very promising model that is now
actively being investigated by an astrophysics community. If it is successful, many
other communities can follow this example.
However, thanks to the cloud paradigm, even more flexible gateway usage

model can be envisaged in the future. This is the model of the instantly created
gateways that are on-demand deployed in a (commercial or academic) cloud when
the user actually needs the use of a gateway. A set of gateway images together with
the images of their associated DCIs will be stored in a cloud marketplace. The user
can select the image that comes with the required DCI and functionality. Then the
selected image (gateway and DCI) will be deployed in the cloud by a single click,
no matter how complex the DCI is. Once the gateway and its connected
infrastructure are deployed in the cloud, the user can run work

ows on the created
DCI via the deployed gateway. In fact, it will appear for the user exactly in the same
way as today a service gateway appears with its connected DCI. Of course, the size
of the DCI will be scalable by simply giving the required DCI resource number as a
parameter before the deployment starts. Furthermore, once such a gateway and DCI
have been deployed in the cloud, the gateway can also be con gured with physical

DCIs to reduce the price to be paid for cloud resources. This approach opens a new
horizon in creating and operating science gateways. A new EU H2020 project is
planned to investigate this new model and to create the required image-sets of
gateways and DCIs. Once this approach is realized, users can freely create the
gateway with the infrastructure they want to use for exactly the time period when it
is needed for a project or for writing a paper, or any other scienti c activities. Of

course, this is only the technical side of the coin. The policies of the funding
agencies also should be changed in order to use project funds to cover the cost of
cloud usage. But this is a new story that is beyond the scope of this topic.