A science gateway for Exploring the X-ray Transient and variable sky using EGI Federated Cloud

TL;DR

This paper presents the design and implementation of a web-based science gateway leveraging the EGI Federated Cloud to facilitate access to and analysis of extensive X-ray transient and variable sky data from the EXTraS project.

Contribution

It introduces a novel science gateway architecture that enables efficient access and analysis of large X-ray data archives using cloud infrastructure, enhancing data exploitation.

Findings

Successful deployment of the portal on EGI Federated Cloud

Improved accessibility to X-ray transient data for researchers

Enhanced software tools for time domain astrophysics

Abstract

Modern soft X-ray observatories can yield unique insights into time domain astrophysics, and a huge amount of information is stored - and largely unexploited - in data archives. Like a treasure-hunt, the EXTraS project harvested the hitherto unexplored temporal domain information buried in the serendipitous data collected by the European Photon Imaging Camera instrument onboard the ESA XMM-Newton, in 16 years of observations. All results have been released to the scientific community, together with new software analysis tools. This paper presents the architecture of the EXTraS science gateway, that has the goal to provide the software to the scientific community through a Web based portal using the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure. The main focus is on the light software architecture of the portal and on the technological insights for an effective use of the EGI ecosystem.