evolving interfaces to impacting technology: the mobile teragrid user portal rion dooley, stephen...
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Evolving Interfaces to Impacting Technology: The Mobile TeraGrid
User Portal
Rion Dooley, Stephen Mock, Maytal Dahan, Praveen Nuthulapati, Patrick
Hurley
Overview
• Background• Design Decisions• Architecture• Implementation• Community Acceptance• Future Plans & Questions
Background
• TeraGrid User Portal (TGUP) is a web portal that aggregates and simplifies access to TeraGrid information and services for active TeraGrid users.
• The purpose of the TGUP is to:– Make resources and services easier to use.– Increasing productivity.– Facilitate greater impact of the TeraGrid project.
Background• The current TGUP provides both information and
applications.– Account, allocation, and user profile management– Resource monitoring– Remote visualization– Remote login and file management– Education and training– Searchable knowledge base
• It does a lot of stuff!!• Currently receives about and 300,000
hits/month
Background
• New trends are appearing:– Mobile web traffic more than doubled last year
and industry leader, Cisco, predicts this will continue at least through 2013 [2].
– Today, one third of mobile users own a smartphone with another third indicating they plan on purchasing one as their next mobile device [3].
Background
Two approaches taken to address this changing market.
• Native Apps
• Webapps
Design• Purpose is to keep users connected and informed
while on the go.• Built for smartphone audience. • Driving use cases are influenced by the user
interface, though not defined by them. • Webapp solution to serve most popular platforms
first (Apple and RIM > 78% of U.S. web requests), keeping in mind those coming on (WebOS, Android)
• Minimally require that all browsers support HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and cookies.
Design
Initial subset of features • User job information• TeraGrid news items• TeraGrid resource status• User allocation information and balances• Direct contact mechanism for the TeraGrid
Help Desk• User profile information and updating
Architecture
Reuse as much of the existing TeraGrid SoA as possible.
• MyProxy Single Sign-on• TeraGrid Integrated Information Services• TeraGrid User Profile Service• GridPort Information Repository• Inca Grid Monitoring Service• MetaData Directory Service (MDS)• TeraGrid News
Architecture
Implementation
Requirements• Fast and responsive• Low bandwidth consumption• Secure• Modern Web 2.0 Look-And-Feel
Implementation
Solutions• PHP• iUI JavaScript library• jQuery JavaScript library• SSL• Authenticated session management
Implementation
Client-side :: public view• News• System Status• Help• Etc
Implementation
Cross-platform
iPhone Palm Pre HTC Hero (Android)
Implementation
Client-side :: authenticated view• My TeraGrid section– User profile– Allocations– Accounts– Jobs
Implementation
Active user jobs listing Detailed job and Notification page
User profile page
Implementation
Server-side :: public information• News: cached TeraGrid News RSS feed, page
scraping for full text• System status: GPIR, Inca
Implementation
Server-side :: authenticated information• Profile, account, and allocation info: User Profile
service• Jobs– Running/Queued/Pending: cached MDS job info
• Note: not available at every site– Finished: TGCDB
• Note: very costly query
• Job notifications: job registry and cron trigger service
Implementation
Server-side :: background processes• System info: queries GPIR and caches to disk• Batch queue query: copies cached MDS queue
info from IIS.• Trigger processing: runs after batch queue
query and processes relevant job notifications.
Implementation
Server-side :: auditing• Log everything to disk• Roll logs monthly• Run analytics script on log files for usage info.
Community Acceptance
• Roughly 2000 hits/month• News, System Status, and Job info are most
popular pages.• Still advertising TGUP Mobile to the
community.
Future Work
• Consulting ticket support• Managing training class registrations• TeraGrid file management through virtual
home space• Integrating Resource Discovery Service• Integrating RESTful downtime service
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by NSF award OCI-0503697 to TeraGrid’s Grid Integration Group (GIG). The TeraGrid User Portal is funded by the NSF and includes input and participation from TeraGrid Partner Institutions. We also acknowledge the NSF-funded Open Grid Computing Environments (OGCE) project for the technology contributions to the User Portal project.
Questions
https://mobile.teragrid.org