Computational Science Portals Group

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Portals Examples

• Kurt Mueller
• Stephen Mock

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Yahoo
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Yahoo

• Initially provided a hierarchical directory of
  resources on the web
• Web pages

• Now, also provides access to interactive
  services
• Email
• Chat
• Shopping
• Maps

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Singapore tourism guide
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Singapore tourism guide

• Comprehensive information about a particular
  topic
• Culture
• Travel

• Access to services relevant to that topic
• Hotel reservations
• Currency conversion

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Intranet portals - SDSC
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Intranet portals - SDSC

• Provides access for a restricted set of users to
  a collection of resources and services relevant
  to only that group
• Staff contact list
• Meeting room scheduling
• Must be authorized to use

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Two paradigms

• Anonymous vs. Authenticated
• Yahoo web directory is anonymous
• Yahoo email is authenticated
• Singapore site is only anonymous
• SDSC intranet is only authenticated

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Two paradigms

• Informational vs. Interactive
• Yahoo has both
• web directory is informational
• email is interactive
• Singapore tourism site has both
• Singapore history vs. online hotel reservations
• SDSC intranet has both
• Contact list vs. web pager gateway

10
Grid portals - NPACI HotPage
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NPACI HotPage

• Provides information about and access to NPACI
  resources
• Compute and archival systems
• Documentation
• News
• Account management tools

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NPACI HotPage

• Useful to a wide variety of people
• Users - scientists, students

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NPACI HotPage

• System administrators

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NPACI HotPage

• Managers

• Politicians like this too

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NPACI HotPage

• Two levels of access to resources
• Informational - no authorization required

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NPACI HotPage

• Interactive - user must login to access

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NPACI HotPage

• Dynamic menus

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NPACI HotPage

• Informational - anonymous
• Current info about eight HPC systems and four
  archival storage systems
• load, queues, node maps, up/down status
• General system information
• documentation, MOTD, scheduled downtimes
• Site information
• Training schedules, news, support

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NPACI HotPage

• Interactive - after login, more features
• Job management
• Compile, submit, track, cancel, view output
• File management
• mv, cp, rm, tar, gzip
• modify permissions chmod
• Upload, download
• View, edit

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NPACI HotPage

• Summary
• Provides access to a wide variety of resources
  and information about many topics
• Useful to people across all facets of the
  organization
• Some features available to everyone others
  require login
• https//hotpage.npaci.edu

21
NPACI GAMESS Portal
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NPACI GAMESS Portal

• GAMESS General Atomic Molecular Electronic
  Structure Systems
• Application portal for ab initio quantum
  chemistry
• Another paradigm app portal vs. user portal
• Application portal is
• Designed for specific audience - quantum chemists
• Customized to run one code - GAMESS
• Limited to one or few compute resources
• Less flexibility simpler operation

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NPACI GAMESS Portal

• Shares some functionality with HotPage
• File management

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NPACI GAMESS Portal

• Job submission

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NPACI GAMESS Portal

• Plus application-specific functions

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NPACI GAMESS Portal

• Summary
• Application portal designed to do one thing
  easily and thoroughly
• Used by a narrow subset of scientists
• Shares some features with HotPage, while others
  are unique
• https//gridport.npaci.edu/gamess

27
NCMIR Telescience Portal
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NCMIR Telescience Portal

• NCMIR National Center for Microscopy and Imaging
  Research
• Application portal for tomography
• Used by scientists from many fields
• Enables scientists to use resources at UCSD from
  anywhere through browser
• Enables NCMIR to use distributed compute
  resources to speed analysis of data

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NCMIR Telescience Portal
User A
User B
Portal
User C
User D
User E
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NCMIR Telescience Portal

• Remote instrument control - TEM

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NCMIR Telescience Portal

• Data management

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NCMIR Telescience Portal

• Tomographic reconstruction

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NCMIR Telescience Portal

• Summary
• Unique combination of resources
• Instrument to gather data
• Transmission electron microscope
• Archive storage systems to store data
• SRB - distributed storage with metadata
• Supercomputers to process data
• IBM SP, Sun, Intel
• https//gridport.npaci.edu/Telescience

34
Portals - Common Features

• Authentication - provide access through web with
  same level of security as ssh
• File management - upload input files, download
  results, modify existing files
• Job management - submit, monitor, retrieve results

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Portals - Common Features

• What else do they have in common?