The Neutron Science TeraGrid Gateway: a TeraGrid science gateway to support the Spallation Neutron Source

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF), or TeraGrid [1] is entering its operational phase. An ETF science gateway effort is the Neutron Science TeraGrid Gateway (NSTG.) The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) resource provider effort (ORNL-RP) during construction and now in operations is bridging a large scale experimental community and the TeraGrid as a large-scale national cyberinfrastructure. Of particular emphasis is collaboration with the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at ORNL. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (USDOE’s) SNS [2] at ORNL will be commissioned in spring of 2006 as the world’s brightest source of neutrons. Neutron science users can run experiments; generate datasets; perform data reduction, analysis, visualize results; collaborate with remotes users; and archive long term data in repositories with curation services. The ORNL-RP and the SNS data analysis group have spent 18 months developing and exploring user requirements, including the creation of prototypical services such as facility portal, data, and application execution services. We describe results from these efforts and discuss implications for science gateway creation. Finally, we show incorporation into implementation planning for the NSTG and SNS architectures. The plan is for a primarily portal-based user interaction supported by a service oriented architecture for functional implementation.