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Virtual Research Environments: The Sakai VRE Demonstrator

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A gateway that is packaged as a Web portal with users in front and TeraGrid ... In these cases the Science gateway is a mechanism to extend the reach of the ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Virtual Research Environments: The Sakai VRE Demonstrator


1
Virtual Research EnvironmentsThe Sakai VRE
Demonstrator
  • Rob Allan, Xiaobo Yang, Rob Crouchley, Adrian
    Fish and Miguel Gonzalez

2
What is a Virtual Research Environment?
  • A VRE is defined as a distributed way of working
    using a Web-based portal and for linking into
    users' desktop applications to access a wide and
    growing range of on-line tools. These include
    access to Grid based computing and data
    management systems as well as collaboration
    tools, some based on Web 2.0. A VRE is both a
    one-stop shop'' for academic users and a
    turnkey solution'' for commercial users.
  • These emerging characteristics of a VRE are
    increasingly overlaid with a requirement to
    provide support for the creation, further
    development, or enhancement of a research
    community in virtual space - a Virtual Research
    Community''. The OST (UK Office of Science and
    Technology) report of March 2006 indicated that
    VRCs have the potential to open exciting new
    opportunities to collaborate in research and thus
    realise significant gains at institutional,
    national and international levels.
  • In this talk we only consider Web based VREs
    using portal technology.

3
JISC VRE-1 Sakai Demonstrator
  • JISC VRE-1 Programme 2005-2007
  • 4 partner sites Daresbury, Lancaster, Oxford,
    Portsmouth (now Reading)
  • Framework extensions
  • Security Shibboleth
  • WSRP
  • JSR-168
  • New tools, DMS, Agora, WSRP Consumer, Grid
    portlets, Blogger, Shared Whiteboard, Bridging
    tools, Semantic search tool
  • Production portal for e-Research projects
    currently some 400 users and 25 projects hosted.

http//rhine.dl.ac.uk8080/portal
4
Classes of User
  • In observing usage patterns we have seen the
    following
  • Expert HPC user is happy to log on and develop
    applications
  • Semi-expert users like remote scripting
    interfaces
  • Novice users like generic portals to test the
    functionality
  • Application-based communities develop rich
    clients, e.g. desktop GUI
  • There is no single solution that will satisfy all
    the diverse requirements, but exposing a common
    set of underlying services and using standards to
    promote inter-operability can help. This is the
    key to rapid and agile application development,
    using and combining remote resources.
  • We are trying to use Sakai to combine a rich set
    of well-integrated internal services with more
    loosely integratedremote services.

5
Classification of Grid User(adapted from Foster
and Kesselman)
6
Some Questions about VRE Usage
  • Deployment and evaluation of such a VRE tests and
    extends our understanding of practical IT-based
    support for research in the following areas
  • How can such frameworks be configured to best
    suit the expectations and work practices of
    different research user communities and
    institutional or organisational contexts?
  • Can tools from multiple institutions and
    organisations be brought together coherently to
    enable sharing of information, processes and
    collaboration?
  • Can community-specific tools be integrated
    meaningfully alongside generic and
    remotely-hosted Web tools?
  • Can a portal-like approach provide the
    flexibility to enable effective use by both
    researchers and administrators?
  • At what points are rich desktop tools or those
    provided by a mobile platform, more effective?
  • How might these be best integrated to provide a
    meaningful user experience?

7
Portals and VREs
  • The idea of portals has been around for a number
    of years. We organised the Portals and Portlets
    2003 Workshop in Edinburgh just at the time when
    two significant pieces of technology, the JSR-168
    portlet standard and WSRP 1.0, Web Services for
    Remote Portlets standard, were being agreed. We
    organised a second Portals and Portlets Workshop
    in 2006.
  • Since 2003, a number of open-source and
    commercial portal projects have been launched and
    are in use for a variety of purposes. One example
    in the UK is the portal for the National Grid
    Service. This evolved from HPC Portal which was
    initially a Perl/ C based environment for
    launching and monitoring Grid jobs similar to the
    US GridPort and HotPage portals from San Diego
    Supercomputer Centre. After briefly using PHP
    technology we have now evolved to using JSR-168
    portlets firstly in the GridSphere and
    StringBeans frameworks and more recently in
    uPortal and Sakai.

See Dave Merediths talk
8
Example NGS Portal
  • HPC Portal v4.0 provides a set of tried and
    tested portlets which will work in a variety of
    frameworks, and can be distributed as MyNGS.
  • Built-in help system offers guidance for new
    users. Training and documentation is also
    available.
  • Open pages show non-authenticated users what is
    on offer.
  • Authentication via modified JAAS layer offering,
    local portal id, Grid certificate authentication,
    Shibboleth.
  • JSDL editing and sharing portlets use an
    underlying database. Sharing JSDL job
    descriptions encourages developments of
    communities of practice around specific Grid
    applications.
  • Job submission across NGS, NW-GRID, SCARF and
    local resources can be configured.
  • Data management also included.

http//portal.ngs.ac.uk
9
NGS Portal Application Registry
10
Science Gateways I
  • A VRE is however more than just a portal. Whilst
    NGS Portal has a number of tools to encourage
    people to share artefacts, e.g. descriptions of
    computational tasks or workflows, it has very
    little built-in community support. It is
    important to address this if e-Science
    technologies and the Grid are going to be taken
    up more widely.
  • In the USA this is done through the concept of
    Science Gateways such as NEESit. A number of
    these science gateways are listed on the TeraGrid
    Web site.
  • Scientific gateways can have varying goals and
    implementations. Some expose specific sets of
    community codes so that anonymous scientists can
    run them. Others may serve as a "metaportal," a
    community portal that brings a broad range of new
    services and applications to the community. A
    common trait of all three types is their
    interaction with the TeraGrid through the various
    service interfaces that TeraGrid provides.
    Although the gateways may be instantiated on
    TeraGrid resources, it is expected that many will
    be instantiated on community resources and be
    administered by the community itself.

11
Science Gateways II
  • Science Gateways signal a paradigm shift in
    traditional high performance computing use.
    Gateways enable entire communities of users
    associated with a common scientific goal to use
    national resources through a common interface.
    Science gateways are enabled by a community
    allocation whose goal is to delegate account
    management, accounting, certificates management,
    and user support to the gateway developers.
  • Science Gateways take three common forms
  • A gateway that is packaged as a Web portal
    with users in front and TeraGrid services in
    back
  • Grid-bridging Gateways often communities run
    their own Grids devoted to their areas of
    science. In these cases the Science gateway is a
    mechanism to extend the reach of the community
    Grid so it may use the resources of the TeraGrid
  • A gateway that involves application programs
    running on users' machines (i.e. workstations and
    desktops) and accesses services in TeraGrid (and
    elsewhere).

12
VREs and CWEs
  • According to Wikipedia a Collaborative Working
    Environment (CWE) supports people (e.g.
    E-professionals) in their individual and
    cooperative work. Research in CWE involves
    organisational, technical, and social issues. It
    lists tools or services which may be considered
    elements of a CWE including e-Mail, instant
    messaging, application sharing, video
    conferencing, collaborative workspace, document
    management, task and workflow management, Wiki
    and Blog. Access Grid is mentioned as being a
    particular type of CWE. It will be seen below
    that many of these tools have also been
    recognised as being important in our VRE
    development and are now available in Sakai. Not
    all this work is described here, in particular
    the important work on the Agora conferencing and
    desktop sharing tool from Lancaster University,
    was initially funded as part of the VRE
    Demonstrator and CQeSS project. This tool
    addresses the requirements of desktop-based video
    conferencing!

http//agora.lancs.ac.uk
13
Agora
  • Agora is an easy to use online meeting tool. With
    Agora you can take your workplace with your
    laptop.
  • Video-conference "many to many" Organised into
    virtual meeting rooms, you can video-conference
    with an unlimited number of participants().
  • Shared desktop You can broadcast what you are
    watching on your desktop.
  • Whiteboard Collaborative whiteboard on which
    anybody can sketch.
  • Chat Instant messaging application.
  • Moviecasting Broadcast movies.
  • Session recording Record your sessions for
    further analysis.

Demos on Lancaster stand
14
Half Way House?
  • Sakai is not a portal, but has many portal-like
    characteristics and similar look-and-feel.
  • Sakai supports a Tool Portability Profile
    enabling close integration within the Sakai
    framework
  • Sakai uses many underlying standards
  • Sakai was designed as a Collaborative Learning
    Environment, so also shares many aspects of CWEs
  • It is designed to be scalable, supporting 10,000s
    of users
  • Works with Oracle 10g
  • To enable interoperability with portal
    technologies we added a WSRP Consumer tool to
    Sakai (there was already a Producer)
  • More recently a native JSR-168 interface has been
    added, based on Pluto 1.1
  • Sakai tools can also be exposed in portals, such
    as uPortal, so Sakai could be viewed as a Service
    Hosting Environment.
  • We think this is required for a VRE

15
Sakai as a VO Management Tool
  • In the terminology of Sakai, a VO maps onto a
    worksite''. Through their worksites, bespoke
    tools can be made available to the VOs that
    require them. Each worksite can be customised to
    have a specific look-and-feel and configured to
    contain just the tools that are required by its
    members. This can include Web interfaces to
    distributed services managed by a particular
    project or hosted as part of a Grid resource.
  • Sakai's internal VO management is through
    role-based policies. Users can be allocated roles
    within each worksite. Roles can be extended by
    administrative users from the small number of
    defaults like admin' and maintain''.
  • Certain users can configure new sites, and
    resources can be shared between sites.
  • Other concepts include permissions, types,
    realms, skins, properties, groups, aliases.
  • Sites can be public, private or joinable.

16
Roles and Permissions
Users see only what they have access to. Some
additional worksites are joinable.
Worksite Role
Front page(not logged in) view only
My site maintain
Site 1 create
Site 2 maintain
Site 3 access
Site x created from Site 1 maintain
Each worksite provides a list of tools and view
of underlying content depending on the users role
17
Managing Users and Tools
18
Customisation and Personalisation
19
Built-in Web 2.0 Services
  • For the end users, Web 2.0 typically provides
    hosted services enabling them to use a Web
    browser to interact with, contribute content to
    the Web and invoke remote operations.
  • There is a growing list of such tools which are
    being hosted in the Sakai server and database.
    They can be rendered as stand-alone pages or
    tiled in various combinations as required.
  • Blog
  • Wiki
  • Calendar
  • Chat client
  • Message Center
  • Shared Resources
  • Announcements
  • Workshop paper management
  • RSS News reader
  • Glossary
  • Threaded Discussion Forum
  • Other tools mashup remote Web 2.0 services from
    Google, Yahoo, FaceBook, etc.

20
Wiki and Discussion Forum
21
Calendar and RSS News
22
My Workspace
Each user has a workspace which aggregates views
of all the sites they belong to.
23
Web 2.0 Map Mashup
  • Recently we have investigated how to augment the
    built-in Web 2.0 services by making use of the
    Yahoo! Maps Web Service. Such a Web API greatly
    alleviates the entry level of developing Web 2.0
    for geo-spatial research applications. The
    services provide a set of APIs (AJAX or Flash)
    through which developers can easily access online
    maps around the world and overlay their own
    information (mashup).
  • What we have tested is to display a map of the
    Sakai Community similar to the one located at the
    Sakai Web site inside our VRE.
  • We expect this kind of mashup technology to be of
    use in a number of research fields such as
    archeology, flood monitoring and prediction,
    climate simulation and urban decision making in
    addition to supporting other forms of
    collaborative working, such as locating Access
    Grid rooms. Users will upload their data into
    Resources/MapData and then select which to
    overlay on the map.

24
Screenshot
25
Rollout, Sustainability and Community
  • Sakai is running on a fully-supported IBM
    BladeCenter at Daresbury Laboratory currently
    with 28 dual-processor Xeon blades. The content
    is hosted in the Oracle 10g database on the UK
    National Grid Service (RAL node).
  • We are currently deploying fully-operational and
    supported Sakai-based VREs for the following
    communities
  • NW-GRID a community of computational scientists,
    both academic and commercial, using compute
    clusters in the North West of England.
  • ESRC e-Infrastructure a community of
    multi-disciplinary social scientists thoughout
    the UK building a common infrastructure and
    adopting e-Science technology through the work of
    NCeSS and ReDReSS http//www.ncess.ac.uk and
    http//redress.lancs.ac.uk
  • Diamond e-Infrastructure a community of
    experimental scientists using the new Diamond
    Light Source http//www.diamond.ac.uk the
    largest investment in science in the UK for 30
    years.
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