WHIP - Workflow Hosted in Portals

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WHIP - Workflow Hosted in Portals

• Kurt Mueller and Andrew Harrison
• School of Computer Science, Cardiff
• And
• Ian Taylor
• School of Computer Science, Cardiff
• Center for Computation and Technology, CCT, LSU
• AHM 07
• 10th September 2007

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Overview

• WHIP Sharing Workflow in Portals
• What is WHIP?
• Generic Scenario Usage
• Scenarios
• Triana DART scenario
• Sharing music information workflows
• GridSphere portlet WHIP demonstrator - DEMO
• myExperiment web 2.0
• WHIPs Role
• RAVE
• Sharing distributed visualisations invoked from
  within BPEL
• WHIP Overview
• Current status the WHIP API (http//www.whipplugi
  n.org/)
• Conclusion

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What is WHIP?

• OMII-UK funded 1-year project
• Based around the myExperiment philosophy
• Share workflows with fellow scientists
• Develop community, foster collaboration
• Facebook for scientists
• How does WHIP fit in?
• Allows arbitrary applications to be launched from
  a browser/web interface
• e.g. Java apps, legacy apps, command line,
  workflow app, etc.
• Allows these apps to exchange information back
  and forth with the web interface.
• e.g. a workflow engine (Triana) launched with
  workflow description, input data and executable
  code.
• Circumvents the need for custom application and
  mimetype integration with the browser for
  launching

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WHIP and JWS - example
Portal Plugin
4. Retrieve jar files
remote
local
5. Launch whippet
WHIP
6. Discover and send data
Web Start
App Plugin
1. Click link 2. Retrieve jnlp file
3. Launch Web Start (JWS)
7. Notify app
browser
workflow client
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Scenarios in the WHIP Project

• WHIP was funded in the OMII portal call
• Driven by three core application scenarios
• DART Portlet for sharing Music Information
  Retrieval Workflows
• Based around the Digital Audio Retrieval using
  Triana (DART) project
• DART programmers want to share Triana workflows
  within a portlet environment e.g. GridSphere
• Creating a prototype demonstrator for this - demo
  later
• myExperiment
• Sharing workflows in a Web 2.0 environment
• Sharing is about creating online communities
• WHIP can support workflow execution from
  myExperiment
• Remote Advanced Visualization Environment (RAVE)
• Collaborative, Web-based visualization
  environment
• Requires communication between web interface, and
  custom visualization tools

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Scenario 1 - DART

• Distributed Audio Retrieval using Triana
• Background
• Joint Project, CCT and Cardiff
• Funding from STFC - mini-PIPSS (1 year)
• Digital Audio Retrieval using Triana (DART)
• P2p system (think SETI_at_home)
• Triana is the workflow manager running on
  end-users CPU
• Developer creates a workflow to analyse audio
  (MP3 files)
• The Workflow is uploaded to all participants in
  the network
• Potentially thousands of MP3 files on users
  machines
• Files analysed locally on clients machines by
  Triana
• Metadata returned e.g. collaborative filtering,
  audio analysis
• Application music recommendation system - i.e.
  if you like Band A, then try Band B

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User
DART Manager
Song Suggestions
Consumer
Worker
Audio Analyser/Provider
New Packages
Result Advertisements
Package Repositories
P2PS Network
Super Peers
Workers
Super Peers
Package Repositories
Workers
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DART portal demo
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2 - myExperiment
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myExperiment is a Web 2.0 Environment for
Scientists to share experiments
Slide courtesy of the myExperiment team
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What are we trying to do?

• Enabling scientists to be (more) creative.
• Enabling scientists to be scientists. And not
  programmers.
• Enabling mediocre scientists to become better and
  thus have better science.
• Enabling smart scientists to be smarter and
  propagate their smartness.
• Accelerate dissemination, pooling, insight.
• Encouraging sanctioned plagiarism.

26/2/2007 myExperiment Slide 11
Slide courtesy of the myExperiment team
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myExperiment principles

• Focus on making it easy to publish information
• Discovering and sharing experimental artefacts
• Publishing results to standard community
  repositories
• Publishing scholarly output
• Familiar social networking / web paradigms
• Keeping it free and fluid and creative.
  Me-Science.
• Crossing system boundaries
• Trans-workflow
• Crossing discipline boundaries
• Multi-disciplinary, Inter-disciplinary,
  Trans-disciplinary
• Clustering expertise
• Intellectual fusion outside discipline.
  We-Science.
• Life Science, Social Science, Astronomy, Chemistry

26/2/2007 myExperiment Slide 12
Slide courtesy of the myExperiment team
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Requirements Design Decisions

• Easy to integrate into a variety of environments
• Portals / portlets
• Web 2.0 environments
• Thick clients
• Make it
• Lightweight
• Composable
• Simple
• A successful artefact sharing protocol already
  exists - HTTP - so use it as a starting point.
  Integrate web services later
• Write as little XML as possible
• Provide application independent protocols/specs
• Provide APIs, tools and plugins for portals and
  applications

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Core API - Modeling Artefacts

• Whip provides a metadata schema that facilitates
  both service-oriented and resource-oriented
  exchanges.
• This allows Web Services based interactions and
  transfer protocol specific interactions (e.g.
  HTTP, GridFTP)
• Whip also defines an archiving format for binary
  transfer that integrates the metadata schema.
• A bit like WAR files - uses the JAR file format
• Using the JAR format, data can be easily signed
  and verified.

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WHIP Portal Plugin

• The portal plugin provides
• a simple means of sharing data between portlets
  in different applications but in the same portal.
• A means of exposing an endpoint from which data
  can be transfered from the portal to an
  application running on the users machine.
• Currently this is implemented using Java Web
  Start (JWS)

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WHIP App Plugin

• The WHIP Application Plugin provides
• A simple means of receiving remote data.
• Does not necessarily require remotely accessible
  ports to be open
• e.g. the JWS component will locate a locally
  accessible Whippet to transfer the data to.
• A simple means of uploading data to a remote
  repository
• Combined with the Portal plugin, data transfer
  can be easily achieved between the application
  interface and the Web interface

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Bridging Environments
Shared Space
remote
local
thin client
thick client
Local execution of workflow
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• Status
• working on API, plugins and DART demonstrator
  now.
• begin myExperiment collaboration soon
• Further info
• http//www.whipplugin.org