Agave API is User-Friendly for Inexpensive Science Gateways

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AGAVE LOCO PEPPER CUREDThis week the Texas Advanced Computing Center released the Agave API 2.o, a cloud-based science-as-a-service platform for gateway development, and Gateway DNA, a collection of open source components enabling the rapid development of science gateways.

Historically, science gateways have been built by small teams of extremely passionate and talented individuals,” said Rion Dooley, lead architect of the Agave API and manager of TACC’s Web and Cloud Services group. “Each gateway would recreate infrastructure from the ground up with very little code sharing between them. While the results were impressive, the cost was enormous. As a result, innovation slowed to a crawl year over year as the majority of time on new projects was spent reinventing the wheel.”

Since its initial release in November 2011, the Agave API has been used by more than 1,000 unique projects worldwide. With this release, the platform will reach a broader community through the introduction of additional services and a new, cloud-based approach to scalability. Agave seeks to spur innovation from day one in the next generation of science gateways by providing a synergetic set of services that developers can use to provide reliable, core science capabilities in their applications.

Think of it like Salesforce for Science,” Dooley said. “Agave gives you an app store full of scientific codes and the ability to run them on shared HPC systems, Condor pools, and even in the cloud. It gives you ‘access-anywhere’ data management, fire-and-forget data movement, federated identity management, metadata support, real time monitoring, notifications, and ‘share anything’ control across your virtual organization. Agave provides all this through a friendly, well-documented, REST API that adheres to the same industry-adopted standards and technologies embraced by organizations like ESPN, Oracle, Netflix, the White House, and thousands of other companies around the world.”

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