On June 17th, our Scientific Coordinator, Tamas Kiss, delivered a keynote speech titled “Towards fully decentralised orchestration in the cloud to edge continuum“, which focused on the Swarmchestrate project results, such as the decentralised approach to orchestration, the notion of self-organisation and the concept of swarms during the 17th International Workshop on Science Gateways, hosted at London, UK.
Science Gateways are a community-specific set of tools, applications, and data collections which provide access to resources and services of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs). Nowadays, computing resources are expanding to include entities such as the hybrid Cloud (Cloud, Fog, Edge), the Internet of Things (IoT) and various off-the-shelf methods of Artificial Intelligence (AI), all of which may be readily used for scientific applications. Additionally, technologies such as Blockchain and Smart Contracts may be used for secure aggregation of resources for scientific work at an unprecedented large scale.
Science Gateways offer the potential to open the utilisation of DCIs to wider audiences by providing a customised and easy to use user interface to access large computational and data resources. The complexity of the underlying infrastructure can be completely hidden from the end-users by a suitably tailored interface. As interest in Science Gateways has accelerated in the past few years, there is an increasing number of new user communities in practically all possible areas of scientific interest.
The 17th IWSG brought together researchers and scientists from different scientific domains, along with software engineers and Science Gateways developers, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, to shape future directions for research, foster the exchange of ideas, standards and common requirements and push towards the wider adoption of Science Gateways in e-Science.