Online web-based science Gateway for nanotechnology research

Abstract

The main objective of Science Gateways is to give users remote access to supercomputers and large-scale computing environments in an interactive, web-based and graphical manner. We present a tool, called Vine Toolkit, that has been successfully used as a core web platform for various Science Gateways. Vine Toolkit is a modular, extensible and easy-to-use tool as well as a high-level Application Programming Interface (API) for various applications, visualization components and building blocks. In a nutshell, it allows interoperability between many different HPC and grid technologies within the service layer. As a result, Vine Toolkit provides an ability to build a portal upon different HPC technologies working together to deliver a complete solution to the users. In this article, we briefly describe our most complex and feature-rich project - the Nanotechnology Gateway, as well as a set of tools relevant to advanced scientific portals, development of which was driven by various requirements defined by scientists and gathered in scope of the PL-Grid project. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.