VIALACTEA science gateway for Milky Way analysis

This paper presents the latest developments on the VIALACTEA Science Gateway in the context of the FP7 VIALACTEA project. The science gateway operates as a central workbench for the VIALACTEA community in order to allow astronomers to process the new-generation surveys (from Infrared to Radio) of the Galactic Plane to build and deliver a quantitative 3D model of our Milky Way Galaxy. The final model will be used as a template for external galaxies to study star formation across the cosmic time. The adopted agile software development process allowed to fulfill the community needs in terms of required workflows and underlying resource monitoring. Scientific requirements arose during the process highlighted the needs for easy parameter setting, fully embarrassingly parallel computations and large-scale input dataset processing. Therefore the science gateway based on the WS-PGRADE/gUSE framework has been able to fulfill the requirements mainly exploiting the parameter sweep paradigm and parallel job execution of the workflow management system. Moving from development to production environment an efficient resource monitoring system has been implemented to easily analyze and debug sources of potential failures occurred during workflow computations. The results of the resource monitoring system are exploitable not only for IT experts, administrators and workflow developers but also for the end-users of the gateway. The affiliation to the STARnet Gateway Federation ensures the sustainability of the presented products after the end of the project, allowing the usage of the VIALACTEA Science Gateway to all the stakeholders, not only to the community members. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.