An integrated workspace for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

Abstract The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) represents the next generation of ground-based gamma-ray observatories. We present a prototype workspace, developed by INAF, that aims at providing innovative solutions for the CTA community. The workspace is composed of a science gateway and an interactive desktop integrated with a federated authentication and authorization infrastructure. The workspace leverages open source technologies providing web access to a set of tools widely used by the CTA community. The workflow management system, accessed via the science gateway, allows to run applications widely used in astronomy and physics researches into distributed computing infrastructures (ranging from clusters to grids and clouds). These software packages are also available through the interactive virtual desktop environment to exploit their native graphical user interface. The implemented authentication and authorization infrastructure is composed by a Shibboleth Identity Provider and a Grouper authorization solution. The Grouper released attributes are consumed by the science gateway to authorize the access to specific web resources and the role management mechanism provides the attribute-role mapping.