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Rapid
Rapid development and deployment of job-submission portals
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.
With Rapid it is now even easier to develop advanced computational portals in a
very short time. The syntax has been simplified and many powerful features have
been added. A few examples:
- new 'static' variables
- better security options with ssh
- vastly improved 'browser' element
- simplified syntax
- array jobs
- 'id' and 'class' tags can make use of web frameworks
We show a screencast of a portlet created for Parallel TCoffee—the first parallel implementation of the TCoffee multiple sequence alignment tool. The portlet was developed using our Rapid technology and shows how TCoffee can be run on the UK National Academic Supercomputer HECToR. To see this demo you require Flash to be installed.
A better understanding of the ground beneath our feet will result from research by seismologists and Rapid—a group of computer scientists at the University of Edinburgh. The Earth's structure controls how earthquakes travel and the damage they can cause. A clear picture of this structure would be extremely valuable to earthquake planners, but it requires the analysis of huge amounts of data. The Rapid team developed a system that performs the seismologists' data-crunching, and have made it easy to use by relying on an interface familiar to all scientists – a web browser.
Below a screencast where Rapid was used to develop a portal for the UK-national academic supercomputer HECToR. The portal shows how to setup an advanced compute job involving computational chemistry. You need Flash installed in the browser to watch the video below. Click here for a large version
This new version of Rapid uses a new and faster build system based on Ant and Ivy that generates smaller portlets. File Browsers are improved and can be used to select multiple files at once. Error reporting is improved with the addition of Schematron Rapid now checks a large number of referential constraints. The Code Generation system has been rewritten and a number of bugs have been fixed.
The inherent limits to the predictability of brittle failure events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are important, unknown, and much debated. We will establish techniques to determine what this limit is in the ideal case of controlled laboratory tests, for the first time in real-time, prospective mode, meaning before failure has occurred.
Develop domain-specific web portals for submitting and managing corresponding compute jobs on the HECToR National Supercomputing Facility (http://www.hector.ac.uk/) in order to reduce the current failure rates and lower the barrier of uptake to new user groups.
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.
Date and time:
Monday, 28 June, 2010 - 12:30
Location:
JISC Roadshow, Swann Building, Kings Buildings, University of Edinburgh, UK
The objective of this JISC-funded pilot project was to remove perceived barriers to uptake of an application that performs analysis of seismic waveform data. The aim was to provide the seismological community with a simplified system that overcame important barriers such as installation and understanding of the analysis package, location and transfer of large amounts of input data and visualisation of results.
Date and time:
Tuesday, 4 May, 2010 - 10:30
Location:
European Geosciences Union, General Assembly 2010, Vienna, Austria
The inherent limits to the predictability of brittle failure events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are important, unknown, and much debated. We will establish techniques to determine what this limit is in the ideal case of controlled laboratory tests, for the first time in real-time, prospective mode, meaning before failure has occurred.
