23 - 25 May, 2012
Amsterdam
The Netherlands

In conjunction with the HealthGrid Conference 2012 and featuring EGI.eu

New technologies and experimental methods in the field of life sciences have enabled researchers to create huge amounts of data in extremely short times. In turn, analysing this data demands a rise of compute power, storage, and data transmission. An enormous number of complex and sophisticated algorithms and tools have been developed to aid research. The demand for compute power and storage is met with a rise in provision of infrastructure and High-Performance Computing facilities and has resulted in the popularity of novel utility computing infrastructures, such as grid and cloud computing. Despite the increasing availability of resources, the broad uptake of these facilities and infrastructures is not following the same pace. The main reasons for this lie in the complexity of the human interface to these computing infrastructures. 

An approach to offer easy and intuitive access to computing infrastructures irrespective of their location is a Science Gateway. Science Gateways are frameworks (or toolsets) which incorporate applications, data and tools to enable running applications on Grid infrastructures. They also provide services to support, upload, search, manage and download (or share) applications and data. The gateways are integrated via portals or sets of applications. Gateways enable user communities to use compute and data resources through a common  graphical user interface in an easy and intuitive way. As a result, users can focus on their applications instead of learning and managing the complex underlying infrastructure.