Title | Giving Computational Science a Friendly Face |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2009 |
Authors | van Hemert, JI, Koetsier, J |
Journal Title | Zero-In |
Volume | 1 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 12--13 |
Abstract | Today, most researchers from any discipline will successfully use web-based e-commerce systems to book flights to attend their conferences. But when these same researchers are confronted with compute-intensive problems, they cannot expect elaborate web-based systems to enable their domain-specific tasks. |
URL | http://www.beliefproject.org/zero-in/zero-in-third-edition/zero-in-issue-3 |
Full Text | Instead, they have to deal with archaic command-line tools or generic portals that mimic the technical complexity of the underlying infrastructure. These interfaces are expensive to use, require much training, and their laborious and intricate processes often lead to errors. Of course exceptions to this situation exist. The most fortunate researchers have access to web portals or scientific gateways that were built to enable their specific tasks. But here we find a significant difference with e-commerce systems: where flights are purchased by millions of customers, these science gateways serve a specific niche inside an already small scientific community. Most of these communities cannot meet, let alone sustain, the cost of developing and maintaining a gateway specific to their requirements. Scientific tasks are not only complex, they also change frequently to reflect progress in the scientific field. The development of scientific gateways is thus expensive since each specific task has its own specific re- quirements. In contrast, purchasing a flight is equivalent for almost everyone. Cost-effective scientific gateways Researchers at the University of Edinburgh’s National e-Science Centre have developed a cost-effective and scalable solution to delivering scientific gateways for computational science. They have recognised that compute-intensive tasks have common use-patterns, and encapsulated these patterns in a declarative language. Using this language, a portal designer can rapidly deploy several portlets within days, forming a scientific gateway. Each portlet guides researchers through their task and enables delayed collection of results. Their solution is appropriately named “Rapid”. So how does Rapid work? • The portal designer specifies the user interface and logic flow of a task. This specification is created in one XML file. Success stories and more Rapid has been successfully applied in several specialist domains: Stable software releases, documentation, tutorials and examples are available at http://research.nesc.ac.uk/ rapid/. Rapid is developed under an Open Source model and is available freely through a GNU General Public license. Feel free to contact us at j.vanhemert@ed.ac.uk to discuss potential applications. |
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Zero-In-Issue3.pdf | 1011.95 KB |