“Social” Science Gateways to e-Infrastructures

Abstract

Notwithstanding the existence of a large and highly-performant computing infrastructure, and the effort made to improve the quality of these e-Infrastructures, the user base has remained quite small relative to the potential number of users. On the other hand Social Networks (SNs) have become extremely popular, thanks in large part to their intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces. Recognising the potential to improve the overall usability of e-Infrastructures, recently, a significant effort has been made to develop e-Collaboration environments allowing scientists to access remote computing facilities, referred as "Science Gateways" (SG).In this paper we present the work done to connect SGs to an existing SN. The main aim of this integration is to allow users to access the tools provided by the SG directly from the SN and to attract a larger audience to these new technologies. The interoperability has been achieved at several levels, from the authentication/authorisation up to the user interface (UI), making the SG accessible from SN user pages.