A Data-Centric Science Gateway for Computational Neuroscience

Science gateways provide user interfaces and highlevel services to access and manage applications and data collections on distributed resources. They facilitate users to perform data analysis on distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) without getting involved into the technical details. The e-BioInfra Gateway is a science gateway for biomedical data analysis on a national grid infrastructure, which has been successfully adopted for neuroscience research. Necessary improvements in this gateway motivated the design of a new next generation of e-BioInfra Gateway. In this paper we describe the motivation, requirements and design of this new gateway, which is based on the WS-PGRADE/gUSE SG framework, allowing for support for other types of DCIs. The new gateway has additional generic data and meta-data management facilities to access and manage (biomedical) data servers, and to provide an integrated and datacentric user interaction. Its first prototype is implemented and deployed for the computational neuroscience research community of the Academic Medical Center of University of Amsterdam. Keywords—science gateway (SG), e-science, virtual laboratory (VL), problem solving environment (PSE), computational neuroscience, medical image analysis