Like science gateways, an education gateway should provide research and management support for a community of practitioners working collaboratively to solve a set of challenging problems. While the technical aspects of the cyberinfrastructure play an important role in the utility of a gateway, they are not sufficient to attract users who are new to collaborative, online scholarship. Over the course of the development of the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) gateway we have learned to adapt our services and messaging to reach out to our target audience and recruit their participation. Part of this process has involved aligning our services with common project management challenges and being aware of the opportunities and constraints faced by teaching faculty. Adopting a client-centered approach has made it possible not only to build our user base, but to foster important conversations among users around promoting a shared culture that supports scholarly approaches to teaching.
In the era of big data, for science gateways (SG) and cyberinfrastructure (CI) projects to have the greatest impacts, the tools need to be widely adopted in the scientific community. However, diffusion activities are often an afterthought in SG/CI projects. We warn against the fallacy of ‘If You Build It, They Will Come’. Projects could be intentional in promoting tool adoption. We identified five external communication practices based on an analysis of 20 interviews with administrators, developers, users, and outreach educators working in CI across the US. The practices include raising awareness of the innovations, engaging in educational outreach, building relationships with trust, networking with the community, and keeping a track record of reliability. While exploratory in nature, the findings can be used as a guideline for project to promote SG/CI diffusion. The paper serves as evidence to justify a bigger budget from funder for diffusion activities to increase adoption and broader impacts.
The Texas A&M University High Performance Research Computing (TAMU HPRC) Portal is a local installation and adaptation of Open OnDemand (OOD) on the HPRC clusters. The portal provides an advanced cyberinfrastructure that enables HPRC users with various backgrounds to utilize the High Performance Computing (HPC) resources for their research. It also serves as an educational platform for HPRC staff to train their users with cluster technologies and HPC applications. Using OOD for the HPRC portal has three benefits. First, it provides a single point of access to all the HPC resources via a web browser and can greatly simplify HPC workflows. Second, it provides an intuitive user interface that significantly reduces the barrier between users and HPC working environments. Third, the extensible and scalable design makes it easy to accommodate a growing number of users and applications. In addition to the out-of-the-box features, we have extensively customized the Matlab interface for our local needs. We have also developed a dynamic form generation scheme that makes the portal app deployment and management more efficient. We have used the portal in multiple training programs and have received positive feedback from the instructors and the users. To understand the impact of the portal on our users, we analyzed portal access data and conducted a survey among HPRC portal users. We received 148 survey responses out of 554 users who have accessed the portal between March 22, 2018 and April 24, 2019. The responses demonstrate that most users think the apps are useful and they would recommend the portal to other users. Additionally, we provide two use cases from our portal users, one for research and one for training, to demonstrate the usefulness of the portal. Our paper is the first that describes the experience with OOD from an HPC site outside of OSC. Overall, the TAMU HPRC Portal based on OOD provides a robust and simple solution for both novice and experienced users at TAMU HPRC to access HPC resources. It is a valuable addition to the traditional command line based approach.
With a broad focus on STEM education, STEMEdhub.org brings together university researchers in STEM disciplines with other researchers, k-12 teachers/practitioners, students and the public through the various groups and projects on the site. Built on Purdue’s HUBzero architecture, STEMEdhub.org is a fully functional Gateway that facilitates the hosting of interactive scientific tools, online presentations, wikis, or documents such as assessment plans and courses for downloading or interactive editing, complemented by document tagging to enable searching and a rating tool for commenting on shared resources. STEMEdhub has been used for over 8 years to build capacity in many areas of STEM Education in the United States and throughout the world. It currently hosts over 6000 users in 160 user groups with over 1300 published resources. More importantly, STEMEdhub.org allows users themselves to create and manage their own groups, resources and communities of practice enabling it to exist on very little overhead with a small staff. While other Scientific Gateways focus on high performance computing capabilities, STEMEdhub is focused on using a Scientific Gateway platform to make connections, build partnerships and engage students. This Demo will show how STEMEdhub.org is used as a Scientific Gateway to build STEM Education Capacity throughout the world.
High performance computing (HPC) has led to remarkable advances in science and engineering and has become an indispensable tool for research. Unfortunately, HPC use and adoption by many researchers is often hindered by the complex way in which these resources are accessed. Indeed, while the web has become the dominant access mechanism for remote computing services in virtually every computing area, it has not for HPC. Open OnDemand is an open source project to provide web based access to HPC resources (https://openondemand.org). This paper describes the challenges to adoption and other lessons learned over the three year project that may be relevant to other science gateway projects, and describes future plans in the Open OnDemand 2.0 project.
