Collaborative Research: SS2-SSI: The Agave Platform: An Open Science-As-A-Service Cloud Platform for Reproducible Science

在当今数据驱动的研究环境中，轻松可靠地访问计算、存储和派生数据源的能力与用于进行实际发现的算法一样重要。地球不是在缩小，而是在数字化，美国研究人员在全球研究界保持竞争力的能力，将越来越多地取决于他们减少从理论到发现时间的能力。在过去的5年中，开源商业领域在编程语言、基础设施设计和接口开发方面的增长和采用大大超过了学术研究领域。几年前主要是学术性质的问题现在在商业世界中很常见。诸如大数据、商业智能、远程可视化和流事件处理等术语已经从课堂转移到了董事会会议室。然而，学术项目在很大程度上无法在其校园和共享研究基础设施的背景下利用许多当今最流行和广泛使用的开源技术。由美国国家科学基金会资助的科学门户研究所最近完成的规划项目揭示了许多社区落后的程度。在一项针对26,000多名nsf资助的pi、科学网关开发人员和高等教育领导者（即首席信息官、首席技术官等）的调查中，超过85%的受访者表示，他们需要帮助调整现有技术以实现其网关的需求。另有80%的人表示，他们需要帮助，简单地了解他们可以使用哪些技术。研究界不仅看到了差距，他们还经历了差距。该项目旨在通过扩展和增强Agave平台（一个开放的、科学即服务的可复制科学云平台），迅速缩小学术和商业基础设施之间的能力差距。从本质上讲，这个项目将使科学家们把精力集中在他们的科学上，而不是他们使用的计算技术上。这个龙舌兰平台将建立在现有的龙舌兰开发人员api的成功基础上，该api目前在植物生物学社区为超过20,000名用户提供服务。该项目包括三个明确定义的工作，它们将协同发展现有技术，使其成为国家研究界可持续的科学即服务平台。首先，它将用额外的服务和管理接口扩展Agave开发人员api，以创建一个内聚的、自供应的Agave平台，该平台将为开发人员社区提供科学即服务。其次，项目团队将与商业和学术机构合作，创建一个基于Docker容器技术的社区驱动的应用程序交换（AX），以促进应用程序的透明性、可移植性、归属和可再现性。第三，该项目将整合已有的Agave生态系统项目的开源贡献到Agave ToGo中，这是一个多语言和web框架的参考科学网关集合。Agave平台将通过使研究界能够利用和访问学术研究基础设施的机制现代化，使所有科学和工程领域的软件和基础设施的访问民主化。这将弥合工业和学术研究基础设施之间的差距，并允许研究人员使用新一代开源软件和技术。AX将在发布和审查计算科学结果的方式上实现更大的互操作性和问责制。通过工业伙伴的配套投资，可重复性、最佳做法和严格的科学审查将以开放和可持续的方式纳入主流，并作为科学进程的一个基本方面加以促进。Agave ToGo将使自定义网关随时可供最终用户和开发人员使用。对于最终用户，它将使他们能够专注于领域科学，而不是计算机科学。对于开发者来说，这将刺激创新并增加被发现的机会。当与Agave平台和应用程序交换相结合时，Agave ToGo将使新手用户能够在几分钟内创建可扩展的、可重复的数字实验室，这些实验室跨越他们的办公室、商业云和国家数据中心。

In today's data-driven research environment, the ability to easily and reliably access compute, storage, and derived data sources is as much a necessity as the algorithms used to make the actual discoveries. The earth is not shrinking, it is digitizing, and the ability for US researchers to stay competitive in the global research community will increasingly be determined by their ability to reduce the time from theory to discovery. Over the last 5 years, the open source commercial sector has greatly outpaced the academic research world in its growth and adoption of programming languages, infrastructure design, and interface development. Problems that were primarily academic in nature several years ago are now common in the commercial world. Terms like big data, business intelligence, remote visualization, and streaming event processing, have moved from the classroom to the board room. However, academic projects are largely unable to take advantage of many today's most popular and widely used open source technologies within the context of their campus and shared research infrastructure. The recently completed, NSF funded, Science Gateway Institute planning project revealed just how far behind many communities are. In a survey of over 26,000 NSF-funded PIs, science gateway developers, and leaders in higher education (i.e., CIOs, CTOs, and others), over 85% of respondents said they needed help adapting existing technologies to realize the needs of their gateway. Another 80% said they needed help simply understanding what technologies were available to them. The research community doesn't just see the gap, they live it. This project seeks to quickly close the capability gap between academic and commercial infrastructure by extending and making robust the Agave Platform, an open, Science-as-a-Service cloud platform for reproducible science. Essentially, this project will allow scientists to focus their energies on their science rather than so much on the computing technologies they use. This Agave Platform will build upon the success of the existing Agave Developer APIs which currently serve over 20,000 users in the plant biology community. This project includes three well-defined efforts which will synergistically evolve the current technology into a sustainable Science-as-a-Service platform for the national research community. First,it will extend the Agave Developer APIs with additional services and management interfaces to create a cohesive, self-provisioning Agave Platform which will enable Science-as-a-Service to the developer community. Second, the project team will partner with commercial and academic institutions to create a community driven Application Exchange (AX) based on Docker container technology to facilitate application transparency, portability, attribution, and reproducibility. Third, the project will consolidate existing open source contributions from projects already with the Agave ecosystem into Agave ToGo, a collection of reference science gateways in multiple languages and web frameworks. The Agave Platform will democratize access to software and infrastructure across all areas of science and engineering by modernizing the mechanisms with which the research community can utilize and access academic research infrastructure. This will bridge the gap between industrial and academic research infrastructure and allow researchers to use a new generation of open source software and technologies. The AX will enable greater interoperability and accountability in the way computational science results are published and reviewed. Through the matching investment of industrial partners, reproducibility, best practices, and rigorous scientific review will be brought to the mainstream and promoted as a fundamental aspect of the scientific process in an open, sustainable way. Agave ToGo will make custom gateways readily available to end users and developers alike. For end users, it will empower them to focus on domain science rather than computer science. For developers, it will stimulate innovation and increase the opportunity for discovery. When combined with the Agave Platform and Application Exchange, Agave ToGo will enable novice users to create scalable, reproducible, digital labs that span their office, commercial cloud, and national data centers in a matter of minutes.