SI2-SSE: GenApp - A Transformative Generalized Application Cyberinfrastructure

GenApp, a Generalized Application Framework [https://genapp.rocks], is a framework for rapidly building and deploying applications to an extensible variety of targets including web-based science gateways. GenApp works by building targets from a collection of definition files. An existing program can be brought into GenApp by writing a definition file and wrapping or modifying the program to accept inputs and produce ou tputsas defined. GenApp was developed to support the needs of the SI2-CHE CCP-SAS project to rapidly expose SAS programs to the community. Some notable features of generated gateways include: interactive 2D plots, 3D plots and atomic structures; user and job management with history and statistics; a “cloud” file system; integrated help and feedback; OAuth credential management; and support for a variety of methodologies for
execution of programs such as direct, elastic (on clouds), and batch (on queue managed clusters or HPC resources). New features and capabilities are added as required by use cases. GenApp is successfully being used to deploy multiple software projects in the SAS domain. GenApp is not limited to SAS software and is being used to deploy software in other areas of science, such as NMR and CFD. GenApp is an affiliate of NSF’s Science Gateways Community institute and has an active engagement with the NSF’s TrustedCI to improve cybersecurity of GenApp generated gateways.