The role of geographical proximity in the establishment and development of science parks – evidence from Nanjing, China

The emergence of science parks is a relatively new phenomenon in China. Apart from the widely debated topics of university–industry linkages, collaboration among firms and spontaneous/policy-driven science parks, the development of science parks in China also has several distinguishing characteristics, such as their ambiguous linkage with urban expansion and their hierarchical structuring pattern. This paper attempts to discuss the motivation and efficiency of spatial proximity in science park development and to explore the role of universities in science parks, the function of science parks as a government project and a case study of location choice by on-site firms. The qualitative analysis, based on in-depth interviews with tenant firm managers and district-level government officers in Jiangning, Nanjing, is used as a basis for discussion.

WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects

Besides core project partners, the SCI-BUS project also supported several external user communities in developing and setting up customized science gateways. The focus was on large communities typically represented by other European research projects. However, smaller local efforts with the potential of generalizing the solution to wider communities were also supported. This chapter gives an overview of support activities related to user communities external to the SCI-BUS project. A generic overview of such activities is provided followed by the detailed description of three gateways developed in collaboration with European projects: the agINFRA Science Gateway for Workflows for agricultural research, the VERCE Science Gateway for seismology, and the DRIHM Science Gateway for weather research and forecasting.

Developing Science Gateways at Various Levels of Granularity Using WS-PGRADE/gUSE

Science gateways can provide access to distributed computing resources and applications at very different levels of granularity. Some gateways do not even hide the details of the underlying infrastructure, while on the other end some provide completely customized high-level interfaces to end-users. In this chapter the different granularity levels at which science gateways can be developed with WS-PGRADE/gUSE are analysed. The differences between these various granu-larity levels are also illustrated via the example of a molecular docking gateway and its four different implementations.

Sharing science gateway artefacts through repositories

Researchers want to run scientific experiments focusing on their disciplines. They do not want to know how and where the experiments are executed. Science gateways hide details by coordinating the execution of experiments using different infrastructures and workflow systems. ER-flow/SHIWA and SCI-BUS project developed repositories to share artefacts such as applications, portlets, workflows, etc. inside and among research communities. Sharing artefacts in re-positories enable gateway developers to reuse them when building a new gateway and/or creating a new application.

Commercial Use of WS-PGRADE/gUSE

Although originally an academic and research product, the WS-PGRADE/gUSE framework is increasingly applied by commercial institutions too. Within the SCI-BUS project, several commercial gateways have been developed by various companies. WS-PGRADE/gUSE is also intensively used within another European research project, CloudSME (Cloud-based Simulation Platform for Manufacturing and Engineering). This chapter provides an overview and de-scribes in detail some commercial WS-PGRADE/gUSE based gateway implemen-tations. Two representative case studies from the SCI-BUS project, the Build and Test portal and the eDOX Archiver Gateway are introduced. An overview of WS-PGRADE/gUSE based gateways for running simulation applications in the cloud within the CloudSME project is also provided.