RDA WORKSHOP - Virtual Research EnvironmentS: What services should they offer and what the e-infrastructures should provide to support them

Day - Time: 27 February 2018, h.09:30
Place: Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa - Room: A-27
Speakers
Referent

Donatella Castelli

Abstract

Virtual Research Environments (also named Virtual Laboratories or Science Gateways) play a key role in supporting communities of practices willing to seamlessly access scattered resources (datasets, services, computing) while performing data-focussed research activities. Various approaches and initiatives have been started to support the development of such environments. This workshop, organized in the context of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) initiative (https://www.rd-alliance.org/), aims at comparing and analysing existing infrastructure based solutions thus to identify the commonalities, complementarities and gaps and to define a shared research agenda. The first part of the workshop, open to everyone interested in the topic in the form of a seminar, will give an overview of three of the existing solutions supporting the provision of VREs: namely Globus, HUBzero and D4Science:

  • I. Foster - The Globus vision
  • M. Zentner - The HUBzero vision
  • L. Candela - The D4Science vision

I. Foster is Director of the Computation Institute, a joint institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. He is also an Argonne Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as climate change and biomedicine. Methods and software developed under his leadership underpin many large national and international cyberinfrastructures.

M. Zentner is Director of HUBzero®, an open source software platform for building powerful websites that host analytical tools, publish data, share resources, collaborate and build communities in a single web-based ecosystem. Originally created by researchers at Purdue University in conjunction with the NSF-sponsored Network for Computational Nanotechnology to support nanoHUB.org, the HUBzero platform now supports dozens of hubs across a variety of disciplines.

L. Candela is Researcher at ISTI-CNR. He has actively participated in the design of the D4Science infrastructure currently operating 100+ VREs. He has also co-designed the solution adopted by D4Science to support the dynamic creation of Virtual Research Environment. His interests include also data infrastructures supporting data publishing and Open Science.