The Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center (formerly, the Science Gateways Research Center) researches, develops, and operates science gateways in collaboration with many clients and partners. Contact us for help building science gateways and deploying advanced software cyberinfrastructure for your community.

The Science Gateways Research Center Is Now the Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center

The Science Gateways Research Center has a new name. Now known as the Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center (CIRC), the name better reflects its new and broader mission to broaden and enhance the use of advanced cyberinfrastructure, including large supercomputers, grids of smaller computers, and advanced data sources.

CIRC’s core mission is to accelerate research, discovery and collaboration through the creation, integration and operation of user-centric cyberinfrastructure that benefits scientific communities. This includes science gateways, which are designed to help entire communities of researchers use high-performance computing resources and advanced cyberinfrastructures to pursue common scientific goals. CIRC has developed science gateways under the NSF-funded Science Gateways Platform as a service (SciGaP) project. The CIRC team participates in the Science Gateways Community Institute and the XSEDE Science Gateways program, both NSF-funded projects that work with scientific collaborators to develop gateways for their communities, which CIRC bases on its SciGaP platform.

Science gateways are only a part of the research cyberinfrastructure stack. Campus bridging is another key element. This includes the bridging of campuses to larger-scale research ecosystems like XSEDE, and it also includes bridging within campuses, between centrally managed research computing facilities and the scientists, engineers, and scholars who need to use them. CIRC participates in XSEDE’s Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration group, which helps campus research computing providers set up new computing resources, integrate them into the national ecosystem, and understand how to reach research and scholarly communities on their campuses.

CIRC is also concerned with what happens to the results of computational science and data analysis after a science gateway or campus computing resources are used. CIRC, in collaboration with the Pervasive Technology Institute’s Data to Insight Center, is working with the Research Data Alliance to develop digital object architecture implementations that help make scientific data easier to find and more accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).

CIRC’s expanded portfolio of services, founded on core open-source software for science gateways, expertise in computing systems, and expertise in FAIR data, gives it a full stack of capabilities to support research organizations at Indiana University and beyond.

Mission

We develop and use open source software to create user tools and environments that help scientific communities do what they could not otherwise do. Cyberinfrastructure software systems must be designed and developed strategically, not just from the requirements of scientists but from deeper understanding of core principles of cloud-scale distributed systems.

Values

The Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center’s core principle is that producing world-class eScience systems requires a cooperative balance between understanding the needs and goals of scientific collaborators, undertaking core eScience research ourselves, and understanding how to operate science gateway software at scale. Open community software that follows the Apache Software Foundation principles is central to this mission.

Scientific Collaboration

Provides software development assistance and consultation service required for scientific collaborations by mediators for scientific and scholarly communities

Operations and Support

The only way to truly understand deeper problems and subtle issues in distributed cyberinfrastructure systems is to run it yourself. The CIRC operates Apache Airavata as a cloud-based Platform as a Service for its collaborators.

Open Community Software

The CIRC believes that open source software must be coupled to an inclusive, open community governance model. We champion the Apache Software Foundation’s principles of meritocratic project governance within the eScience community.

eScience Research

The CIRC has a core mission to undertake eScience research in scientific cyberinfrastructure and to educate students in modern cloud architectures to prepare them for the modern workforce.

Apache Airavata

Apache Airavata is a framework for building scientific gateways to manage complex computations, proving to be the heart and soul of the Research Center deployed in multiple projects, growing its community and helping scientists each day.

Course

Apache Airavata is taught as a part of Indiana University Computer Science Topics in Systems (CSCI-B 649) track. The foundation Science Gateway Architecture course is taught every Fall and an Advanced course every Spring.

MORE DETAILS
Work with us

If you are a student, developer, designer, architect, scientist, engineer and would like to contribute to open source and Apache Airavata you can checkout the website and ask on mailing lists.

MORE DETAILS

Publications and Presentations

We recommend the following publications to get an overview of our center activities. Thank you for citing our work.

  • Marru, Suresh, Marlon Pierce, Sudhakar Pamidighantam, and Chathuri Wimalasena. "Apache Airavata as a laboratory: architecture and case study for component-based gateway middleware." In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on The Science of Cyberinfrastructure: Research, Experience, Applications and Models, pp. 19-26. ACM, 2015. Link
  • Pierce, Marlon E., Suresh Marru, Lahiru Gunathilake, Don Kushan Wijeratne, Raminder Singh, Chathuri Wimalasena, Shameera Ratnayaka, and Sudhakar Pamidighantam. "Apache Airavata: design and directions of a science gateway framework." Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 27, no. 16 (2015): 4282-4291. Link
  • Pierce, Marlon, Suresh Marru, Borries Demeler, Raminderjeet Singh, and Gary Gorbet. "The apache airavata application programming interface: overview and evaluation with the UltraScan science gateway." In Proceedings of the 9th Gateway Computing Environments Workshop, pp. 25-29. IEEE Press, 2014. Link
  • Pierce, Marlon E., Suresh Marru, and Chris Mattmann. "Patching It Up, Pulling It Forward." Journal of Open Research Software 3, no. 1 (2015). Link
  • Nakandala, Supun, Sudhakar Pamidighantam, Shameera Yodage, Nipurn Doshi, Eroma Abeysinghe, Chathuri Peli Kankanamalage, Suresh Marru, and Marlon Pierce. "Anatomy of the SEAGrid Science Gateway." In Proceedings of the XSEDE16 Conference on Diversity, Big Data, and Science at Scale, p. 40. ACM, 2016. Link

Follow our Google Scholars profiles to get our latest publications.

Gateway Operations

We have been working with scientific communities to easily use scientific applications deployed across a wide range of supercomputers, campus clusters, and computing cloud.

Meet the Team

CIRC employees are researchers, scientists and students as both graduate research assistants and hourly employees. We welcome you to become involved as well. Interested students should engage with the Apache Airavata community through the developer mailing list to demonstrate their software design skills and development abilities.

Marlon Pierce

marpierc@iu.edu

Suresh Marru

smarru@iu.edu

Sudhakar Pamidighantam

pamidigs@iu.edu

Eroma Abeysinghe

eabeysin@iu.edu

Jun Wang

wang208@iu.edu

Marcus Christie

machrist@iu.edu

Dimuthu Upeksha

dwannipu@iu.edu

Robert Quick

rquick@iu.edu

Isuru Ranawaka

isjarana@iu.edu

Students

Dinuka De Silva

Alumni

Thejaka Amila Kanewala

Lahiru Gunathilake

Nipurn Doshi

Raminder Singh

Saminda Wijeratne

Chathuri Wimalasena

Heshan Suriyaarachchi

Viknes Balasubramanee

Shameera Rathnayaka

Mangirish Wagle

Hrushikesh Dhumal

Supun Nakandala

Abhijit Karanjkar

Ajinkya Dhamnaskar

Anuj Bhandar

Ameya Advankar

Gourav Ganesh Shenoy

Sneha Tilak

Eldho Mathulla

Sachin Kariyattin

Stephen Paul Adithela

Gowtham Kannan

Shivam Rastogi

Aarushi Bisht

Bhakti Narvekar

Eric Coulter

Rick Mcmullen

Anna Branam

Tanya Kuruvilla