Common Resource Descriptions for Interoperable Gateway Cyberinfrastructure

Science gateway projects face challenges utilizing the vast and heterogeneous landscape of powerful cyberinfrastructure available today, and interoperability across technologies remains poor. This interoperability issue leads to myriad problems: inability to bring multiple heterogeneous specialized resources together to solve problems where different resources are optimized for different facets of the problem; inability to choose from multiple resources on-the-fly as needed based on characteristics and available capacity; and ultimately a less than optimal application of nationally-funded resources toward advancing science. This paper presents version 1.0 of the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) Resource Description Specification - a schema providing a common language for describing storage and computing resources utilized by science gateway technologies - as well as an Inventory API and software development kits for incorporating resource definitions into gateway projects. We discuss multiple gateway integration design options, with trade offs regarding robustness and availability. We detail the adoption to date of the SGCI Resource Specification by several prominent projects, including Apache Airavata, HUBzero (R), Open OnDemand, Tapis, and XSEDE. The XSEDE adoption is worth highlighting explicitly as it has led to a new API within the XSEDE Information Services architecture which provides SGCI resource descriptions of all active XSEDE resources. Additionally, we show how the use of the SGCI Resource Specification provides interoperability across resource providers and projects that adopt it. Finally, as a proof of concept, we present a multi-step analysis that runs Quantum ESPRESSO and visualizes the energy band structures of a Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) crystal across multiple resource providers including the Halstead cluster at Purdue University and the Stampede2 supercomputer at TACC.