ESCAPE D5.4: Final Assessment of the Performance of the Science Platform Prototype
Creators: name: Swinbank, John D.
name: Bertocco, Sara
name: Collinson, James
name: Füßling, Matthias
name: Grange, Yan
name: Garrido, Rafael
name: Hughes, Gareth
name: Kliffen, Klaas
name: Parra‐Royón, Manuel
name: Sánchez Expósito, Susana
name: Verdes‐Montenegro, Lourdes
name: Verkouter, Marjolein
name: Vermaas, Nico
name: Voutsinas, Stelios
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This document provides an evaluation of the vision for, the delivered capabilities of, and the future prospects for ESAP, the ESFRI Science Analysis Platform. ESAP is a key part of the interface between the services delivered by the ESCAPE project and the scientific community: it will provide a unified mechanism by which users can discover and interact with the data prod‐ ucts, software tools, workflows, and services that are made available through ESCAPE, and it is designed to be extensible and flexible to adapt to the emergent requirements of future projects. The development of ESAP has been the fundamental activity of ESCAPE Work Package 5. ESAP, in and of itself, does not provide any compute or analysis capabilities. Rather, it acts as a broker between users and the various services which are available to them. For example, ESAP will help users identify datasets which are of interest to them (perhaps by interrogating the ESCAPE “data lake”, or an ESFRI‐specific archive), to locate software and workflows which can help them analyze that data, and connect them to services which can execute analyses codes on their behalf (perhaps interactively, such as in a Jupyter notebook, or by scheduling jobs on a batch processing system). ESAP abstracts the details of the various heterogeneous underlying systems from the user, so that they can use a unified, coherent interface to access all of the various services they need. It does this by adopting a modular, flexible architecture. The user will connect to a service‐independent web‐based user interface, which in turn communicates with the API Gateway. By adopting a set of standard programming interfaces and conventions, the Gateway can easily be extended to address whatever current or future capabilities are exposed through the EOSC. Over the course of the ESCAPE Project, ESAP has grown from a vision to a mature and usable software prod‐ uct, which can be immediately deployed in a range of scenarios. Based on the material presented here, we conclude that ESAP has broadly achieved the goals that were set out at the beginning of the ESCAPE project, and is starting to see uptake in the ESFRI community. It has also become clear that much of its potential remains to be tapped: major ESFRIs can build upon the sys‐ tems delivered by ESCAPE to address the extreme requirements of the next generation of data‐ and compute‐ intensive infrastructures. We look forward to seeing ESAP continue to grow as an open‐source project even as the Horizon 2020 funding draws to a close, and we will continue to seek appropriate funding opportunities to support that effort. This document is submitted as ESCAPE project deliverable D5.4, Final Assessment of the Performance of the Science Platform Prototype.