Science Gateways Community Institute at two years. Paper presentation at PEARC18

1. Award Number
ACI-1547611
Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, Principal Investigator
wilkinsn@sdsc.edu
Science Gateways Community
Institute

2. 7 years of planning, 2
years of execution, 15 min
update
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3. We were one of the first two long-term centers of
excellence funded by the NSF in 2016
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4. What did we propose?
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Community
Engagement &
Exchange
Workforce Development
Incubator
Extended
Developer
Support
Scientific
Software
Collaborative
• Diverse skills, on demand
• Hands-on help building gateways
• An app store for gateways!
• Interactions with others building
gateways
• Venue for publishing
• Opportunities for students
A unique platform-independent approach to gateway
development.
We recommend what’s best for the client.

5. How’s it going?
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6. Great!
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7. The end
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8. Just kidding
What did we learn?
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9. Incubator
• Engaged a total of 18 projects for consulting purposes
• usability studies, financial modeling with sustainability analysis, technology
selection, and a variety of short-term, question-and-answer activities
• Anticipated intense intense engagements of one or two months in duration,
the reality more closely resembles that of startup companies.
• Many consulting engagements need brief periods of intense help (hours to a few days)
followed by extended periods of inactivity while clients work through the issues
discussed during the short period.
• As a result, the Incubator consulting capacity is higher than anticipated in the number
of clients that may be simultaneously engaged, with overall less intense continuous
engagements.
• Usability is an exception to this, high demand for intensive engagements
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10. Extended Developer Support
Modeled after XSEDE ECSS program
• Variety of clients!
• Size
• Small, single PI projects
• Large multimillion dollar awards
• Type
• Citizen science
• Cloud or campus computing
• Classroom/education
• Instrument+computing
• Nobel prize winning domain, commercial interest
• Research area
• Drug discovery, ecological science, cryo-EM,
application parallelization, network monitoring,
neuroscience, coastal flooding
• Funding source
https://sciencegateways.org/consulting/clients

11. Early experiences – what have we seen
• Gateways most beneficial in communities
where data generation is exploding (cryo-
EM), need for computation is great,
experience of the user community is limited
• Gateways can help in fields with access to
newly digitized data, for example text
analytics of newspaper archives as
exemplified in a criminal justice project
• Gateways have been less successful when
data formats dictated by a federal agency
changed without the knowledge of the
developer
• Key here is to be closely tied in to changing
data standards if a gateway relies on external
data
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12. How to better scale going forward
• Maximum impact for each
consultation
• Blog entries, with an emphasis on the
technical challenges that were overcome
• Provide solutions for others to common
problems such as authentication
• Help gateway frameworks improve their
engineering processes or add
functionality
• Support for campus gateway groups to
increase gateway-building expertise
• Workforce Development interns add to
this as well
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13. Scientific Software Collaborative
• catalog.sciencegateways.org
• Like an app store for those looking for
gateways
• Early progress slowed because SSC
team was also setting up critical
infrastructure for the project (Jira,
Trello, Slack, Google forms that
communicate with Hubspot)
• Don’t underestimate this
• We see the catalog growing into a
vibrant place that allows communication
between gateway developers, both
established and future
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14. Community Engagement
• Conferences, webinars, newsletters,
website
• First conference held in Nov 2016 to
stick with fall schedule
• Funding for SGCI only started in Aug…
mad scramble!
• Nearly tripled prior attendance
• Looking to scale services and expand
the community
• Volunteer program committee for
Gateways 2018
• Expand campus gateway groups initiative
• Sandra Gesing (Notre Dame) leading, would
love to connect more closely with Campus
Champions
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15. Workforce Development
• 4-week coding institute, travel support for students and summer
internships with gateway developers
• First ever hackathon at PEARC18!
• Early partners
• National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and
Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) and Association of Computer and Information
Science/Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions (ADMI)
• Expand recruitment including SACNAS, Grace Hopper, SXSW
• Leverage existing training elsewhere, focus on gateway-specific skills
• Graduate-level gateway course taught at IU for two years
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16. Great outcomes from our first summer
interns
6 students placed with SGCI staff or clients
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17. Management
• Vision, data, execution
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18. These tools have been critical for light-weight project
management
And extensive team communication!
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19. Future work
• Methodically reach out to researchers, educators, and scholars who can benefit from our services
• Focus on underrepresented demographic groups and underrepresented disciplines
• Keep abreast of rapidly evolving technology landscape continues to evolve
• Jupyter Notebooks and Jupyterhubs
• Investment in staff development is critical
• Definitions of gateway will continue to widen
• Ties to publications, data, ability to reproduce results through a gateway
• Already seeing gateways incorporated into online textbooks so students can perform computations as they are studying
• Work to build expertise independent of SGCI offerings
• Develop a program to instantiate “mini-institutes” on campuses, organizing all the expertise that SGCI offers, but at a
campus level
• Science ambassadors program (in addition to our existing Steering Committee) to engage
representative members of our community in shaping the opportunities and impacts that we pursue.
• Continue to grow partner and affiliates (software providers) programs
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20. Thank you
• Contact us to work together
• help@sciencegateways.org
• This work was supported National Science Foundation grant
ACI-1547611
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www.sciencegateways.org