PEARC 2021 Tutorial Abstract

Title: Developing Science Gateways using Apache Airavata

Tutorial Length: 3 hours

Tutorial Description and Goals: In this tutorial, we present the Apache Airavata middleware and the new Django Portal for Airavata, which provides an extensible frontend for building Apache Airavata-based science gateways. The goal of the tutorial is to demonstrate the use of Apache Airavata as a gateway environment that can be used to manage the execution of scientific software on diverse computing resources; to enable users to create, organize, replicate, and share computational experiments; to enable gateway providers to leverage Apache Airavata’s platform services to quickly deploy a science gateway that provides access to XSEDE, university, departmental, and commercial cloud computing resources; and to give gateway providers an environment for creating highly customizable and configurable gateways that can target diverse research groups.  

This tutorial will showcase new capabilities not present in prior PEARC tutorials, including extensive customizability of the new Django Portal for Airavata user interface environment, advanced file handling across distributed resources, and standalone security components that can be integrated into a wide variety of gateway platforms.

Relevance to PEARC20: Science gateways provide science-specific user interfaces for scientific applications for end users who are unfamiliar with or need more capabilities than provided by command-line interfaces.  Science gateway middleware like Apache Airavata provides the general purpose capabilities behind gateway user interfaces. Gateways are particularly valuable in making the latest software such as machine learning applications available to users and helping users access the newest XSEDE and other resources, assisting researchers and students with a wide variety of skills to “catch the wave” for accessing new scientific software and advanced systems. 

Target audiences for this tutorial include a) scientific software developers, who want simplified ways to deliver their software and support larger user communities; b) educators who want to integrate scientific software usage into their classroom without having students get bogged down in the submission mechanisms of specific resources; and c) campus computing center staff, who want to use gateways to broaden their reach beyond their traditional users and to help users make more efficient use of resources.

Format: The format will be a mixture of presentations, demonstrations, and hands-on exercises, as described in the detailed agenda. The agenda indicates the roles of each of the organizers and the nature of each section (presentation, demonstration, exercise, discussion). In summary, the tutorial will be approximately 75% demonstrations and hands-on exercises, and 25% presentations and discussion.   

Prerequisites: Participants should have a general knowledge of how to execute scientific applications on HPC and Cloud environments. Only a web browser will be required to follow the demo sessions and hands-on sessions, but optional programming exercises will require a Mac OS X laptop or a laptop with a common Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu.  Computations on XSEDE will use the tutorial team’s XSEDE community account allocation.

Special Requirements: the full tutorial assumes network access by the instructors and attendees. If network problems occur, the presenters can give the tutorial in demonstration-only mode. 

Instructors and Roles: The tutorial will be offered by leaders of the Apache Airavata project. As a top level Apache Software Foundation project, Airavata follows Apache’s open source governance model and the instructors are all committers (developers), contributors and project management committee members of Airavata. Marlon Pierce will lead the overall tutorial and will introduce science gateways and Airavata. Eroma Abeyasinghe and Marcus Christie will present the hands-on exercises. Sudhakar Pamidighantam will guide hands on examples of Gaussian model execution from a gateway. Suresh Marru will present Airavata architecture and under the hood details. All presenters are actively involved in XSEDE ECSS projects and Science Gateway Community Institute consultations. 

Recent Tutorial Offerings: This half-day tutorial will build on XSEDE14, XSEDE15, XSEDE16, PEARC17, PEARC19, and Gateways 2019 tutorials. Extensive tutorial material is available from https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/AIRAVATA/PEARC+2019+Tutorial+Agenda, https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/AIRAVATA/Gateways19+Tutorial+Agenda, and https://airavata.readthedocs.io; see also https://courses.airavata.org. Previous tutorials have had 20-25 attendees each.