Toward Interoperable Cyberinfrastructure: Common Descriptions for Computational Resources and Applications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a standardized, platform-independent way to describe computational resources and applications in cyberinfrastructure, aiming to improve interoperability among science gateways and workflow systems.

Contribution

It introduces uniform semantics for resource and application descriptions and sketches a resource registry approach for community adoption.

Findings

Proposes a common description framework for resources and applications.

Discusses implementation strategies for a resource registry.

Outlines future directions for an application description language.

Abstract

The user-facing components of the Cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem, science gateways and scientific workflow systems, share a common need of interfacing with physical resources (storage systems and execution environments) to manage data and execute codes (applications). However, there is no uniform, platform-independent way to describe either the resources or the applications. To address this, we propose uniform semantics for describing resources and applications that will be relevant to a diverse set of stakeholders. We sketch a solution to the problem of a common description and catalog of resources: we describe an approach to implementing a resource registry for use by the community and discuss potential approaches to some long-term challenges. We conclude by looking ahead to the application description language.