Web Portals for Computational Science

Not every user knows how to submit a compute job by a remote login or to adapt to different job- submission systems when switching between facilities. In recognition, a recent trend is to provide web portals as an interface, which come in two types, each with its own major drawback. The first type consists of generic job-submission portals, which still require many technical specifics to be supplied by the user and much manual handling of data and results. The second type consists of domain-specific portals, which are expensive and time-consuming to build and maintain. In this tutorial we offer participants an overview of existing toolkits and frameworks for delivering portal solutions. We provide a basic hands-on tutorial on building portals and a more advanced hands-on session to deal with application and resource specific requirements.