Improving Science Gateways usage reporting for XSEDE

Science Gateways have gained wide use by research community by providing a rich and easy to use web interface to access and utilize complex cyberinfrastructure. Science Gateways are consuming an increasing proportion of computational capacity provided by XSEDE. A typical approach employed by Science Gateways is to use a single community account with a compute allocation to process compute jobs on behalf of their users. The computation usage for Science Gateways is compiled from batch job submission systems and reported by the XSEDE service providers. However, this reporting does not capture and provide any information about the user who actually initiated the computation, as the batch systems do not have record this information. To overcome this reporting limitation, Science Gateways utilize a separate pipeline to submit job-specific attributes to XSEDE, which is then later co-joined with batch system information submitted by the Service Providers to create detailed usage reports. In this article we describe improvements to the Gateway attribute reporting system, which better serves the needs of the growing number of Science Gateways by providing their operators a simpler and versatile interface to easily report a richer set of attributes and ultimately publish this information via XDMoD that enables various stake holders to assess resource utilization and their potential impact.