CI CoE: SGX3 - A Center of Excellence to Extend Access, Expand the Community, and Exemplify Good Practices for CI Through Science Gateways

SGX3项目加强了科学门户和科学门户社区的创建、使用和持续的可持续性。科学门户是一个基于Web的平台，它允许大量研究人员、教育工作者、学生和公众访问复杂而昂贵的资源，如超级计算机、科学仪器和大型数据集，并作为一个社区进行协作。通常，这些资源很难以本机方式访问，并且需要高度的计算机编程技能。虽然研究人员和教育工作者可能在他们的科学领域拥有丰富的知识，但他们大多缺乏这样的编程技能。科学门户使计算方法和复杂的研究基础设施更易于使用，从而使研究人员能够专注于他们的科学问题。有了科学门户，参与科学进步和教育未来科学技术劳动力的人数大大增加和多样化。因此，科学门户是提高国家科技竞争力的关键要素。科学门户面临着维持运营的挑战，原因有很多，包括软件工程实践不足、现有技术的重新发明、无法从研究项目过渡到生产服务、缺乏与其他网关和社区成员的合作伙伴关系，这些可能会增加门户的高调内容、人员流动和可用性差。此外，科学门户还必须以满足不断产生的新的科学需求为中心，例如，新资助的大型计算基础设施、人工智能的进步、社区可找到和访问的资源的需求、数据与计算资源的物理分离、受监管的数据需求以及新的或专门的计算资源的可用性。SGX3通过提供一系列服务来帮助科学界解决这些问题，从而实现了增加科学门户使用率和可持续性的目标。SGX3由专家从业者组成，每个人都在科学网关领域工作多年。这些服务包括：1)技术设计和选择，以帮助研究人员在不重新发明现有技术的情况下建立科学网关；2)用户体验设计，以确保科学网关对其用户提供尽可能低的障碍；3)教育服务，培训科学网关专业人员关于可持续性和软件工程的良好做法；4)劳动力发展，以培训有关科学网关的教员，从而使学生成为科学网关开发者；5)外联活动和一系列会议，以促进科学网关社区的发展；和vi)制定路线图的前瞻性活动，以应对支持新的科学和工程领域所需的下一代科学门户技术进步。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The SGX3 project enhances the creation, use, and ongoing sustainability of science gateways and the science gateway community. A science gateway is a web-based platform that allows large audiences of researchers, educators, students, and the public to access complex, expensive resources such as supercomputers, scientific instruments, and large data sets, as well as to collaborate together as a community. Often these resources are difficult to access natively and require a high degree of computer programming skill. While researchers and educators may have significant knowledge in their scientific areas, they mostly lack such programming skills. Science gateways enable researchers to focus on their science questions by making computational methods and complex research infrastructure easier to use. With science gateways, the number of people who can participate in making scientific advances and educating the future science and technology workforce is vastly increased and diversified. Consequently, science gateways are a key element in increasing the nation’s competitiveness in science and technology.Science gateways are challenged to sustain their operations for many reasons, including inadequate software engineering practices, reinvention of existing technologies, inability to transition from a research project to a production service, lack of partnering with other gateways and community members who may add high-profile content to the gateway, staff turnover, and poor usability. Further, science gateways must also pivot to fulfill new scientific needs that continually arise through, for example, newly funded large computing infrastructures, advances in artificial intelligence, needs for resources to be findable and accessible by the community, the physical separation of data from compute resources, regulated data requirements, and the availability of novel or specialized computing resources. SGX3 achieves its goals of increasing science gateway use and sustainability by offering a suite of services to help the scientific community with these issues. SGX3 is composed of expert practitioners, each of whom has been working in the field of science gateways for many years. The services include i) technology design and selection to help researchers building science gateways to do so without reinventing existing technologies; ii) user experience design to ensure that science gateways offer the lowest possible barrier to their users; iii) educational services to train science gateway professionals on sustainability and good practices for software engineering; iv) workforce development to train faculty about science gateways and thus students to become science gateway developers; v) outreach activities and a conference series to catalyze the science gateway community; and vi) forward looking activities to develop roadmaps that address the next generation of upcoming science gateway technology advances necessary to support new areas of science and engineering.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.