We present the water science gateway developed at the University of Hawaii (UH), called the Ike Wai Gateway, Ike meaning knowledge and Wai meaning water in Hawaiian. The gateway supports research in hydrology and water management by providing tools to address questions of water sustainability in Hawaii. The gateway provides centralized web-based user interfaces and APIs supporting multi-domain data management, computation, analysis and visualization tools to support reproducible science, modeling, data discovery and decision support for the Hawaii EPSCoR Ike Wai research team and wider Hawaii hydrology community. By leveraging the Agave platform UH has constructed a gateway that ties data and advanced computing resources together to support diverse research domains including microbiology, geochemistry, geophysics, economics and humanities, coupled with computational and modeling workflows delivered in a user-friendly web interface and REST APIs. Current features include data/metadata management and sharing, computational job execution/management, jupyter notebook integrations, and containerized computing. These capabilities form the basis for an extend-able API base that will be leveraged to tie in additional components and decision support applications as the Ike Wai project continues to progress.
Over the past decade, stable isotopic landscape modeling has become a promising approach to answering a wide array of questions in multiple disciplines. However, its application has been hindered by the difficulty for individual researchers to collect, compile, and integrate environmental and isotopic data over large spatial and temporal scales and to develop and interpret geostatistical models. To help address these challenges, we developed a science gateway called IsoMAP (http://isomap.org/) which provides an online workspace for spatial analysis, modeling and prediction of stable isotope ratio variation in the natural environment. One of the main challenges in developing the IsoMAP gateway is to efficiently integrate a variety of large scale heterogeneous environmental and isotopic datasets into the isoscapes modeling workflow to ensure real-time query response at the front end as well as timely data update at the back end. In this paper, we will describe how the geospatial data processing workflow was implemented in the initial version of gateway and how it is being optimized by leveraging the built-in geospatial data processing capabilities and the materialized view object of the PostGIS database. Our preliminary evaluation shows that the data update process is significantly improved with greater reliability. The system downtime is reduced from several days to a few hours for each update. Our experience and lessons learned will be applicable to the development of other geospatial data workflows, a common task in the cyberinfrastructure of many science disciplines.
Science Gateways facilitate researchers’ work by simplifying access to High Performance Computing (HPC) systems, data management and collaboration between all parties involved. For Natural Hazards Engineering Research (NHER) this is particularly difficult because of the different types of research (or projects) available in this context. Also, these types of projects are highly interactive and involve collaboration of multiple parties. In addition, there is a substantial amount of analysis, transformation and visualization of large amounts of data. NHER projects are often structured in different ways and it is necessary to offer flexibility when building a platform aiming to be used by as many researchers as possible.
Designsafe helps to solve these problems by working together with different Natural Hazard Engineering Researchers. First, we developed multiple standardized models (for each type of project) based on different experiments presented by volunteer engineers. Based on these models we built a simple user interface (UI), which was presented to the volunteer engineers, making sure it will work within their own workflow. Finally, we implemented all the functionality to help users easily take advantage of HPC systems, manage their own data within a highly interactive and collaborative space. Designsafe also offers a very simplistic publication workflow to ensure every research is correctly curated and its data correctly preserved. On top of this, every publication is easily shareable and discovered. This paper will focus more on how the functionality was implemented to build Designsafe.
