OneSciencePlace is designed to address the core challenges of research cyberinfrastructure. These case studies demonstrate how OSP has been deployed across a range of institutional contexts — from building new gateways to modernizing legacy systems and simplifying access to large campus HPC resources.

Quakeworx — Open-Access Seismic Research Gateway

Quakeworx is an extensible framework for earthquake simulations, providing researchers with browser-based access to advanced seismic modeling tools across multiple national HPC resources.

The challenge: The project needed a robust, sustainable gateway that could federate access across multiple national HPC centers, without the cost and ongoing maintenance burden of custom development.

How OSP helped: Quakeworx was built on OSP's composable framework and integrated multiple national HPC centers via the compute integration module. The no-code UI builder was used to create a unified, simplified interface for researchers, removing the need for custom front-end development.

Outcome: A scalable, maintainable gateway that federates computational access across national resources from day one — with a consistent user experience and minimal ongoing engineering overhead.

Community engagement: The first Quakeworx workshop in January 2025 demonstrated immediate community impact — planned for 20 attendees, the event drew 162 applications from researchers across 16 countries, with 65 accepted. Of those, 92% were students or postdocs and 56% identified as women. During the workshop, 84% of participants logged in and ran over 400 HPC jobs. Post-workshop surveys showed 95% planned to use Quakeworx in their future research and 100% would recommend it to a colleague.

At a glance: 105 users, 1,800 jobs run, 21 curated applications across multiple ACCESS HPC systems. Integrated systems: Expanse (SDSC) in production, Stampede3 (TACC) in beta, Delta (NCSA) incoming, plus two standalone servers (cloud and SDSC). Currently in the early-user phase, with a planned production launch in Summer 2026.

Further reading:

Quakeworx App Store showing domain-specific earthquake simulation tools
The Quakeworx App Store — domain-specific earthquake simulation tools delivered through OSP, accessible from any browser.

UCLA Hoffman2 HPC Portal — Deployment in Progress

The Hoffman2 cluster is UCLA's primary shared HPC resource, supporting thousands of researchers across campus. Making it accessible to a broad and diverse user base — without sacrificing security or administrative control — is a long-standing challenge for research IT.

The challenge: Simplify and standardize access to a large, campus-wide HPC cluster for users ranging from experienced computational scientists to first-time HPC users, while maintaining fine-grained access control across departments and projects.

How OSP is helping: OSP is currently being deployed as the official web-based portal to the Hoffman2 cluster. The compute integration module manages job submission across the cluster, and role-based access control (RBAC) provides granular access management across departments and research groups.

Expected outcome: A visual App Store interface for complex HPC applications that lowers the barrier to entry for new users and maximizes the return on investment for campus cyberinfrastructure.

Modernizing a Legacy Phylogenetics Gateway

One of the most widely used phylogenetics gateways in the world — serving thousands of researchers across institutions — faced a familiar crisis: the original development team had moved on, leaving behind a complex, custom-built system that was expensive to maintain, difficult to update, and increasingly difficult to secure.

The challenge: Migrate a mission-critical research gateway with decades of legacy code to a modern, sustainable infrastructure — without disrupting the researcher community that depends on it.

How OSP helped: OSP's composable architecture was used to decouple the scientific application logic from the web infrastructure, wrapping the existing phylogenetic tools in a modern, managed framework. The migration moved the system from labor-intensive custom maintenance to a fully managed environment.

Outcome: Drastically reduced operational costs and maintenance burden, with a modernized platform that the science team can extend and update without specialized web engineering. The migration demonstrated that OSP can successfully absorb and modernize even the most complex long-standing research infrastructure.

OSP Also Supports

Beyond these featured deployments, OSP's modular architecture supports a range of smaller-scale and specialized needs:

Curriculum and workshop environments — Scalable portals delivering Jupyter, RStudio, and persistent workspaces to students, with simple federated sign-in and prebuilt application environments.

FAIR data repositories — Streamlined institutional repositories for meeting funder mandates, assigning DOIs, and publishing research outputs with configurable metadata.

Small lab portals — Lightweight environments for faculty PIs to manage applications, share data, and publish outputs without requiring a dedicated IT team.

Working on a similar challenge? Discuss your use case with the OSP team 

For the full range of supported use cases by scale and context, see the Use Cases page