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Science gateways, also known as advanced web portals, virtual research environments, and more, have changed the face of research and scholarship over the last two decades. Scholars world-wide leverage science gateways for a wide variety of individual research endeavors spanning diverse scientific fields. Evaluating the value of a given gateway to its constituent community is critical in obtaining the financial and human resources to sustain gateway operations. Accordingly, those who run gateways must routinely measure and communicate impact. Just as gateways are varied, their success metrics vary as well. In this survey paper, a variety of different gateways briefly share their approaches. 

Abstract Science Gateways provide an easily accessible and powerful computing environment for researchers. These are built around a set of software tools that are frequently and heavily used by large number of researchers in specific domains. Science Gateways have been catering to a growing need of researchers for easy to use computational tools, however their usage model is typically single user-centric. As scientific research becomes ever more team oriented, the need driven by user-demand to support integrated collaborative capabilities in Science Gateways is natural progression. Ability to share data/results with others in an integrated manner is an important and frequently requested capability. In this article we will describe and discuss our work to provide a rich environment for data organization and data sharing by integrating the SeedMeLab (formerly SeedMe2) platform with two Science Gateways: CIPRES and GenApp. With this integration we also demonstrate SeedMeLab’s extensible features and how Science Gateways may incorporate and realize FAIR data principles in practice and transform into community data hubs. 

GenApp is an NSF-funded framework for rapid generation of applications including feature rich science gateways. GenApp is being successfully used to produce science gateways wrapping scientific programs. Its organization is designed to simplify the process of adding new features and capabilities to generated applications. A limited set of definition files define application generation. To bring a new executable into GenApp, one creates a single "module" definition file. The executable must run on some compute resource accessible by the generated application. Installations of the executable on target resources may be complex. To simplify portability of execution, we introduce automatic containerization of defined modules and integration of container execution. Abaco is an NSF-funded web service and distributed computing platform providing functions-as-a-service (FaaS) to the research computing community. Abaco implements functions using the Actor Model of concurrent computation. We introduce GenApp integration of execution with Abaco as a resource.