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Rapid
Rapid development and deployment of job-submission portals
1. Removal of most child elements of the' page' element. This is replaced with a method in which variables are used to input data.
2. Authentication elements have been removed. Setting username/passwords are performed using variables.
3. New 'loadfile' and 'savefile' elements. Used to load and save files from/to variables.
Persistence. Logging out of the portal no longer deletes old jobs.
Added support for the Range datatype.
Added an 'index' attribute to the text and radio button user interface elements to set values for individual sub-jobs.
Fixed several bugs.
Although some scientists, such as many physicists, may prefer a command line approach to submitting computational jobs, a majority of scientists want to be shielded from the innards of a computer. A popular approach is to build portals; user community web sites that allow job submissions from the convenience of a web browser.
Introduces Rapid, its goals and provides the following information:
* current status of the project
* plans for next three months
* what the software does and who it's targeted at
* how the software integrates with other tools and the software used by target communities of users
* other requirements (e.g. other software that could benefit the project)
The primary issue is to enable end-users in the domain of chemistry to make use of computational applications. Currently, a small set of expert-users is able to make use of these tools and they often perform tasks for end-users. This setup does not scale up well as the number of expert-users is not growing. Many of the tasks are well defined and it should be possible to enable these via a web portal.
Support for username/password authentication.
It is now possible to delete jobs from the job monitor.
Advanced job monitoring options.
GSIFTP, FTP and SFTP URLs now have paths relative to the users' home directory.
Various bug fixes.
The philosophy of our system, which we call Rapid, is to deliver customised graphical user interfaces that allow a domain specialist to achieve certain tasks. These tasks make use of domain-specific applications that require much computational resources; a requirement which is satisfied by translating the task into one or several computational jobs to be performed on Grid Computing infrastructures and HPC facilities. The customised interface will allow the task to be performed without referring to terminology about the underlying computational infrastructure.
We show a screencast of a portlet created for the EaStChem project, which is the premier Chemistry research school for Chemistry in Scotland and one of the largest in the UK, with around 500 researchers. The portlet allows chemists to run the most popular simulation software Gaussian 03 and visualises their results in 3D through the use of JMol. To see this demo you require Flash to be installed.
We introduce an approach that allows rapid development and deployment of such portal systems, and which uses a philosophy quite different from any other portal system that exist today. Whereas most Grid Computing and HPC portals are graphical representations for the underlying technical components, our system delivers portals that allow specialists to perform tasks in the context of their own domain.
We show a screencast of a portlet created for the nanoCMOS project, which a UK consortium to use e-Science and Grid technology to tackle nano-CMOS design challenges. The portlet involves running a number of simulations of nano-scale electronic designs using ngspice, of which certain results are then aggregated in a graphical plot. To see this demo you require Flash to be installed.
We show a screencast where we install Apache Tomcat, GridSphere and Rapid, and then compile and deploy the example included with Rapid, which allows to execute a simple emboss filter on images. To see this demo you require Flash to be installed.
The primary issue is to enable end-users in the domain of chemistry to make use of computational applications. Currently, a small set of expert-users is able to make use of these tools and they often perform tasks for end-users. This setup does not scale up well as the number of expert-users is not growing. Many of the tasks are well defined and it should be possible to enable these via a web portal.
