CCGrid 2014 Airavata Tutorial - Under Construction

Tutorial at the 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing  - IEEE/CCGrid2014

Tutorial Title: Developing Computational Science Gateways using Apache Airavata

Date: Thursday May 29th 2014

Venue:  Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel, Chicago, IL, USA

Presenters:

 Suresh Marru

Suresh Marru directs the Science Gateways program within the Cyberinfrastructure: Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). He is responsible for specialized scientific community interfaces to large scale cyberinfrastructure. Marru is a Member of the Apache Software Foundation and is the Vice President of the Apache Airavata project. His broad research interests lie at the intersection of application domain science; high performance computing and distributed systems.His current research focus is to investigate next generation science gateway and workflow systems to support interactive, adaptive and dynamic needs of exploratory science

 Marlon Pierce

 Marlon Pierce is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and serves on the PMC for the Apache Airavata Project. He is the project manager for the Science Gateway Group at Indiana University and is interested in the intersection of computational science, distributed computing, and openly governed software communities.  Pierce has published over 100 sited conference papers and journal articles on the application of Web Services, service-based workflows, messaging systems, and Web frameworks to problems in distributed computing.  He has also championed the adoption of the Apache Software Foundation and its open source principles in the scientific and research computing communities.

Software Requirements: Java, SSH Shell, Web Browser

 Prerequisite Knowledge: General understanding of Cluster and Grid computing, Batch Job Submission, Science Portals/Gateways. Knowledge of Java & Web services is preferable but not required.

 Description:

This tutorial is aimed at science gateway developers and program managers who are responsible for delivering gateway capabilities to scientific communities. Science gateways, or Web portals, are an important mechanism for broadening and simplifying access to computational grids, clouds, and campus resources.  Gateways provide science-specific user interfaces to end users who are unfamiliar with or need more capabilities than provided by command-line interfaces.  Gateways share many core functionalities beneath their domain-specific user interfaces, which has led us to develop the Apache Airavata system.  Airavata provides the services needed to translate science application-centric gateway requirements into resource-centric middleware APIs, as well as adding value by tracking a user’s project metadata, storing provenance information for later reproducibility and sharing, and coordinating multi-staged workflow tasks.  In this tutorial, we will introduce the audience to Airavata through introductory demonstrations and walk through hands-on exercises.  Participants will learn how to use Airavata to manage computations on XSEDE supercomputers and campus cluster resources. Participants will be given hands-on exercises using Airavata through a Java-based reference implementation portal, which they can use after the tutorial as the basis for their own gateway.  Participants who already operate gateways and have preferred Web frameworks will learn how to use the Airavata API through language-specific (PHP, Java, Python, JavaScript, etc) client development kits enabled by Airavata’s Apache Thrift-based API.

Target Audience: 

The tutorial is suited for intermediate audience. The audience will benefit from a background of executing scientific applications on HPC, HTC or Cloud environments. Developers with programing experience will also benefit from extending the Apache Airavata framework. 

Since gateways touch all aspects democratizing computational resources, the tutorial is intended for a broad range of attendees, including distributed systems developers, gateway users, science application developers, and technical audience. 

Take home:

• What science gateways are
• What projects are good candidates for science gateways
• How science gateways are built
• What software packages are available for building science gateways
• What services and infrastructure resources available to support gateways
• How to get extended gateway support resources through XSEDE’s ECSS
• How to integrate with XSEDE (authentication, usage, submission, etc...)
• How to extend the framework to integrate with other Grid and Cloud infrastructures