Building Science Gateway Infrastructure in the Middle of the Pacific and Beyond

In order to increase support for diverse projects amongst a wide range of research areas in accessing advanced computational and data resources, both local and national, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (UH) and the University of Melbourne, Australia (Melbourne) partnered with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to utilize the Agave platform. However, due to distance and the unique geographical locations of Hawai'i and Australia it was necessary to setup local Agave platform instances to provide responsive and robust middleware against which flexible science gateways could be constructed. To lower the entry barrier, required staff, and time required to stand up a local infrastructure, UH became the first external site to use the Agave Deployer which provides a combination of DevOps automation tools and containers to deploy and maintain a functional local Agave authentication/authorization, core science, and data persistence API instances. UH worked with TACC on testing the initial release of the Agave Deployer to provision the local UH infrastructure and later assisted Melbourne in adopting the Agave Deployer to stand up their infrastructure. We present the experiences and lessons learned in deploying and developing science gateway infrastructure and applications at these two institutions.