Use Cases | HPC Portals, Science Gateways, Lab and Instructional Portals

OneSciencePlace (OSP) supports a wide range of scientific, educational, and data-sharing scenarios, from single-PI labs to national-scale collaborations. Each deployment context below describes who it is for, what problem it solves, and how OSP addresses it.

Individual & Lab Scale

Research Team & Lab Portal

Who it is for: Faculty PIs, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students who need a shared environment for their lab without dedicated IT support.

The challenge: Research teams accumulate a mix of applications, datasets, and outputs spread across personal computers, shared drives, and institutional storage. There is no single place to manage, share, or publish lab work, and setting one up typically requires more web development expertise than a research team has available.

How OSP helps:

• Host lab members, applications, publications, and private datasets in a single branded environment
• Publish research outputs, protocols, and applications as shareable, citable objects with DOIs
• Manage the lab environment through a streamlined interface, without dedicated IT support or custom development
• Start small and expand as the lab grows: add users, applications, and storage over time

Departmental & Campus Scale

Education & Training Portal

Who it is for: Instructors, workshop leaders, and teaching and learning centers delivering computational coursework or hands-on training.

The challenge: Delivering a consistent, reproducible computing environment to a classroom or workshop is technically demanding. Students spend time on setup rather than learning, environments differ across machines, and managing access for a large group is cumbersome.

How OSP helps:

• Deliver curriculum-integrated applications (Jupyter, RStudio, and others) with persistent workspaces for assignments
• Simplify student onboarding through federated identity, students sign in with institutional credentials
• Support virtually any Linux application, not just browser-based environments
• Integrate campus HPC and cloud resources under a single class account
• Scale seamlessly from a small workshop to a large course without additional configuration

Campus Research Portal

Who it is for: Research IT teams, campus cyberinfrastructure groups, institutes, and centers supporting multiple research groups.

The challenge: Central IT often supports a flagship cluster, but individual labs are left to build their own solutions for computing and data sharing, leading to fragmented security, duplicated effort, and wasted resources. Bringing everything under one institutional platform typically requires significant custom engineering.

How OSP helps:

• Provide a unified institutional portal with institutional branding and federated authentication
• Deliver a centralized, curated App Store featuring validated computational tools
• Connect multiple institutional compute resources: local clusters, cloud, and national systems, through a single managed interface
• Manage access controls across multiple computational and storage resources from one interface
• Enable cross-lab and cross-college resource sharing without rebuilding infrastructure for each group
• Give individual departments private, branded workspaces while sharing underlying HPC clusters

HPC Portal

Who it is for: HPC centers, campus cluster administrators, and IT groups focused on making cluster resources accessible to a broad user base.

The challenge: High-performance computing often comes with a steep learning curve. Researchers spend hours on setup, file management, and remote access hurdles before doing any actual science. For HPC center staff, onboarding new users and supporting diverse workflows consumes significant time that could be directed elsewhere.

How OSP helps:

• Deliver the full power of HPC clusters through an intuitive browser interface: no command-line required
• Connect multiple compute systems through a single interface: local clusters, national HPC resources, cloud instances, and standalone servers all accessible from one login without switching platforms
• Stream high-performance GUI tools (MATLAB, ANSYS, RStudio) directly to the browser via secure reverse-proxying
• Build custom launch interfaces for complex batch jobs using the no-code UI builder, no custom development needed
• Configure the portal in user space, no root privileges required
• Manage interactive and batch job submission across one or more integrated clusters and clouds
• Maintain persistent research environments where data, software versions, and job configurations are ready to resume

Already using Open OnDemand? OSP complements rather than replaces existing HPC portal investments. OOD serves technically sophisticated users well; OSP extends access to the full range of researchers, students, and instructors who find command-line environments unfamiliar. Beyond accessibility, OSP offers capabilities OOD does not, a single OSP instance can connect multiple compute systems simultaneously, spanning local clusters, national HPC resources from ACCESS and NAIRR programs, cloud instances, and standalone servers, all accessible through one interface and one login. When permitted by administrators, researchers and power users can also contribute and share their own applications directly through the platform without requiring systems staff involvement. Many institutions run both, using OSP to reach broader user communities and enable multi-system access and community sharing that OOD alone cannot provide.

FAIR Repository & Publishing Platform

Who it is for: Funded research projects, data journals, and institutional repositories seeking compliance with funder open-access mandates.

The challenge: Funder mandates (NSF, NIH) require data to be FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Capturing the relationship between a result and the software version used to create it is often a manual, error-prone process. Building a compliant repository from scratch requires specialized development that most research teams cannot sustain.

How OSP helps:

• Publish datasets, articles, software, notebooks, and workflows in a customizable FAIR-compliant repository
• Assign DOIs, Handles, or ARKs for permanent citation and reliable referencing
• Automate metadata capture — every time an app runs via OSP, job parameters, software versions, and input files are logged automatically
• Support flexible metadata schemas and configurable curation workflows
• Create verifiable, audit-ready records of the entire research lifecycle from computation to publication
• Configure embargo periods and access restrictions to align with funding policies

Community & National Scale

Science Gateway

Who it is for: Domain communities, national research collaborations, and scientific societies providing shared access to discipline-specific tools and data.

The challenge: Building a science gateway that federates access across institutions, integrates multiple national HPC resources, and supports a broad community of researchers without requiring a large, dedicated engineering team to build and maintain it.

How OSP helps:

• Provide centralized access to domain-relevant applications, data, and reproducible workflows
• Connect domain researchers to multiple national HPC resources through a single interface — no separate accounts or logins per system
• Enable community members to contribute and share domain-specific applications directly through the gateway
• Federate user access across institutions without requiring a shared identity provider
• Integrate multiple national HPC centers through the compute integration module
• Build unified, simplified interfaces for researchers using the no-code UI builder
• Support cross-institutional collaboration with built-in provenance tracking for reproducible research
• Publish and cite community tools and datasets with FAIR-compliant publishing and persistent identifiers

Across All Scales

Moving Beyond Your Current Gateway, Portal, or Jupyter Setup

OSP provides a modern platform for research communities ready to grow beyond their current environment — whether migrating from a legacy gateway or expanding from a Jupyter-based setup — offering a sustainable, managed foundation without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch.

Who it is for: Research teams and institutions maintaining gateways or portals built on aging custom code that has outlived its original developers.

The challenge: Research portals and gateways built on custom code a decade ago often outlive the teams that built them. For researchers, the result is a system that is slow to change — adding new applications, updating workflows, or responding to evolving science requires expensive custom development. For institutional IT, the burden is different: security vulnerabilities go unpatched, maintenance costs grow, and a system too important to shut down becomes increasingly difficult to support.

How OSP helps:

• Decouple scientific application logic from the web infrastructure, wrapping legacy tools in a modern, managed framework
• Shift the burden of security patching, SSO integration, and web server uptime to the OSP platform rather than the science team
• Preserve existing scientific workflows while modernizing the delivery and access layer
• Move from labor-intensive custom maintenance to a fully managed environment and continue growing your researcher community on OSP.

Key Platform Differentiators

Ready to discuss your deployment? Talk to the OSP team

Not ready yet? See how OSP compares with other research computing platforms