Maytal Dahan

The GridPort toolkit: a system for building Grid portals

Grid portals are emerging as convenient mechanisms for providing the scientific community with familiar and simplified interfaces to the Grid. Our experience in implementing Grid portals has led to the creation of GridPort: a unique, layered software system for building Grid portals. This system has several unique features: the software is portable and runs on most Web servers; written in Perl/CGI, it is easy to support and modify; it is flexible and adaptable; it supports single login between multiple portals; and portals built with it may run across multiple sites and organizations. The feasibility of this portal system has been successfully demonstrated with the implementation of several application portals. We describe our experiences in building this system, including philosophy and design choices. We explain the toolkits we are building, and we demonstrate the benefits of this system with examples of several production portals. Finally, we discuss our experiences with Grid web service architectures.

TeraGrid's integrated information service

The NSF TeraGrid project has designed and constructed a federated integrated information service (IIS) to serve its capability publishing and discovery needs. This service has also proven helpful in automating TeraGrids operational activities. We describe the requirements that motivated this work; IISs system architecture, information architecture, and information content; processes that IIS currently supports; and how various layers of the system architecture are being used. We also review motivating use cases that have not yet been satisfied by IIS and outline approaches for future work.

Grid Portal Toolkit 3.0 (GridPort)

GridPort is a toolkit for developing Web-based portals and applications for computational science on top of underlying distributed and grid computing infrastructure. GridPort aggregates grid services from popular grid software packages and provides additional grid capabilities, while presenting a simple, consistent API for portal and applications developers.

Science Gateways: The Long Road to the Birth of an Institute

Nowadays, research in various disciplines is enhanced via computational methods, cutting-edge technologies and diverse resources including computational infrastructures and instruments. Such infrastructures are often complex and researchers need means to conduct their research in an efficient way without getting distracted with information technology nuances. Science gateways address such demands and offer user interfaces tailored to a specific community. Creators of science gateways face a breadth of topics and manifold challenges, which necessitate close collaboration with the domain specialists but also calling in experts for diverse aspects of a science gateway such as project management, licensing, team composition, sustainability, HPC, visualization, and usability specialists. The Science Gateway Community Institute tackles the challenges around science gateways to support domain specialists and developers via connecting them to diverse experts, offering consultancy as well as providing a software collaborative, which contains ready-to-use science gateway frameworks and science gateway components.

Case Study: Microservice Evolution and Software Lifecycle of the XSEDE User Portal API

The XSEDE User Portal (XUP) [1] is a web interface providing a set of user specific XSEDE services and documentation to a diverse audience. The XUP architecture started out depending on monolithic services provided by large Java libraries, but continues to evolve to use an application programming interface (API) [2] powered by a set of microservices [3]. The goal is to have the XUP API provide development and deployment environments that are agile, sustainable, and capable of handling feature changes. In making this transition, we have developed guidelines for API services that balance complexity and reuse needs with flexibility requirements. In doing so, we have also created our own set of best practices on how to convert to using microservices. In this paper we will use the XSEDE User Portal API development as a case study to explain our rationale, approach, and experiences in working with microservices in a real production environment to provide better and more reliable science services for end users.

Increasing TeraGrid User Productivity through Integration of Information and Interactive Services

The TeraGrid user portal is a Web portal that aggregates and simplifies access to TeraGrid information and services for active TeraGrid users. The vision for the TeraGrid user portal is to become the resource that all TeraGrid users turn to for access, education, use and support of TeraGrid systems. The user portal is an operational activity of the TeraGrid project while also serving as a platform for software development and integration of TeraGrid services. The initial release of the TGUP in 2006 provided a single place for researchers to access documentation and user information, review the capabilities and current status of all resources, and learn how to get access to systems and support. Since the initial release, the development team has improved the initial capabilities and integrated many new features to make using the distributed resources of TeraGrid easier and further increase user productivity. The improvements and additions since the initial release cover three classes of TGUP features: informational services, interactive services, and user-centric services. This paper will describe some of the most important recent additions to TeraGrid User Portal capabilities, and will discuss planned future capabilities and their expected impact.

The Science Gateways Community Institute at Two Years

The Science Gateways Community Institute was one of the first two software institutes funded by the National Science Foundations Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in August, 2016. The structure of and services offered by the institute were developed as a result of seven years of planning grants that funded focus groups, a 5000-person survey and the development of a strategic plan. Now two years in, we provide an overview of the institutes service offerings and their usage, reflect on the experiences of some early clients, review our approaches to metrics and evaluation, and describe some lessons learned. We also describe the lightweight, adaptive management approach employed by the institute. SGCI is organized into five service areas: Incubator, Extended Developer Support, Scientific Software Collaborative, Community Engagement and Exchange, and Workforce Development. This paper will highlight early successes in all five areas, from client achievements to conference experiences to our impact on students. We highlight areas where the institute has evolved --- based on community feedback --- from what was originally envisioned. We describe our use of the Entrepreneurial Operating System as a lightweight management approach for a highly adaptive organization. Finally, we include early plans for the execution phase of the institute.

Evolving interfaces to impacting technology: the mobile TeraGrid User Portal

The TeraGrid User Portal (TGUP) [1] is a web portal that aggregates and simplifies access to TeraGrid information and services for active TeraGrid users. The purpose of the TGUP is to make using the large number of diverse resources and services of the TeraGrid easier for the national open science community, thus increasing their productivity and the impact of the TeraGrid project. As the portal capabilities have expanded and improved TGUP usage surpassed 300,000 hits a month. To continue increasing the impact and visibility of the TeraGrid project and the TeraGrid User Portal the team developed TGUP Mobile. TGUP Mobile is a lightweight, responsive web application providing a subset of TGUP capabilities via a mobile device. This paper describes the architecture, design, and development of the TGUP Mobile application, and examines the community acceptance and synergy created through the development of both the traditional portal and TGUP Mobile.