Investigating a Science Gateway for an Agent-Based Simulation Application Using REPAST

The benefits of using e-Infrastructure environments, such as cloud, grid, and high performance computing, for performing scientific experiments could be quite significant. In particular, modeling and simulation, which can serve as a key decision making and system analysis tool, could benefit immensely from such environments ranging from issues of how a community of practice could access a simulation to how it could be run quickly. However, the access and use of these e-Infrastructure environments may present a completely different set of challenges, most especially for non Information and Communications Technology (ICT) users. Science Gateways (SG), which are digital interfaces to advanced technologies, can be used to overcome the challenges of running many simulations on e-Infrastructures in a reasonable amount of time. In this work, we developed a SG, based on the Liferay portal framework and the Catania grid and cloud engine. We show how an Agent-Based infection simulation, which has been implemented using the Recursive Porous Agent Simulation Toolkit (REPAST) Simphony, can be ported to a Science Gateway and deployed on distributed computing infrastructures. This demonstration illustrates how this technology can be used easily to allow multiple users across the world to access a simulation and to execute their applications in an e-Infrastructures environment.