Building Problem Solving Environments with Application Web Service Toolkits

Application portals, or Problem Solving Environments (PSEs), provide user environments that simplify access and integrate various distributed computational services for scientists working on particular classes of problems. Specific application portals are typically built on common sets of core services, so reusability of these services is a key problem in PSE development. In this paper we address the reusability problem by presenting a set of core services built using the Web services model and application metadata services that can be used to build science application front ends out of these core services

The Gateway Computational Web Portal: Developing Web Services for High Performance Computing

We describe the Gateway computational web portal, which follows a traditional three-tiered approach to portal design. Gateway provides a simplified, ubiquitously available user interface to high performance computing and related resources. This approach, while successful for straightforward applications, has limitations that make it difficult to support loosely federated, interoperable web portal systems. We examine the emerging standards in the so-called web services approach to business-to-business electronic commerce for possible solutions to these shortcomings and outline topics of research in the emerging area of computational grid web services

Web Services Based Architecture in Computational Web Portals

Computational web portals provide user environments that simplify access and integrate various distributed computational services for scientists working on particular classes of problems. The computational web portal, Gateway, consists of a dynamically generated and browser-based user interface that adds the client applications and a distributed component-based middle tier, WebFlow. The WebFlow middle tier provides a coarse-grained approach to accessing both stand-alone and grid-enabled back end computing resources. Like most computational web portals, Gateway was originally implemented in a three-tiered structure. This has inherent limitations for building portals that can easily interoperate and share services. Specific application portals are typically built on common sets of core services, so reusability of these services is a key problem in Problem Solving Environment development. In this dissertation we address the reusability problem by presenting a comprehensive view of an interoperable portal architecture, beginning with a set of core services built using the Web services model and application metadata services that can b

Application Web Services

This report gives an overview of web services, with a particular focus on how to deploy and use an application as a web service. This is a work in progress and part of the proposed Application Metadata Working Group [1] and the Grid Computing Environments Research Group [2] of the Global Grid Forum, so revisions and refinement will occur. An application here means specifically some code developed by the scientific community. Examples would be finite element codes, grid generation codes, and visualization tools. These might be written in Fortran or C, may be parallelized with MPI, and so on. From the point of view of the portal interactions, these details are unimportant in our approach. We will treat all these applications as black boxes and will describe here how to wrap these applications in XML proxies. The wrappers can then be converted into Java data classes for manipulation by services. No modification of the application source code is required. We refer to this as proxy wrapping, as distinguished from the direct service wrapping one might generate with a tool such as SWIG. The following figure summarizes our general architecture. An actual application (a scientific code or a database, for example) is wrapped by a Java program. For databases, this is well known: the Java application just makes a JDBC connection to the database and defines and implements an API for clients to interact with the database. Likewise, scientific applications can be wrapped by general purpose Java applications, which can be used to invoke the application, either directly or through submission to a queuing system. The WSDL interface is the XML abstraction of this wrapper application interface and can be viewed as a list of instructions for building clients. The actual client (say, a JSP p..

Interacting Data Services for Distributed Earthquake Modeling

We present XML schemas and our design for related data services for describing faults and surface displacements, which we use within earthquake modeling codes. These data services are implemented using a Web services approach and are incorporated in a portal architecture with other, general purpose services for application and file management. We make use of many Web services standards, including WSDL and SOAP, with specific implementations in Java. We illustrate how these data models and services may be used to build distributed, interacting applications through data flow

Building Problem Solving Environments with Application Web Service Toolkits

Application portals, or Problem Solving Environments (PSEs), provide user environments that simplify access and integrate various distributed computational services for scientists working on particular classes of problems. Specific application portals are typically built on common sets of core services, so reusability of these services is a key problem in PSE development. In this paper we address the reusability problem by presenting a set of core services built using the Web services model and application metadata services that can be used to build science application front ends out of these core services, and the management of multiple versions of services

COSMIC2 – A science gateway for cryo-electron microscopy

Recent advances in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) have led to the wide-spread adoption of the technique worldwide to allow the determination of atomic protein structures. In order to use this powerful technique, however, scientists must use high performance computing resources in order to calculate protein structures from terabytes of image data. We have built the COSMIC² science gateway to provide researchers with access to the computing resources available on the Comet supercomputer located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. In order to handle terabyte-sized data uploads, we have integrated the file transfer service Globus into the gateway. During this demonstration, we will highlight the user interface and data ingestion process used by the gateway, while also discussing considerations for user interface and design

A Science Collaboration Environment for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation

The vision of cyberinfrastructure is to provide “the comprehensive infrastructure needed to capitalize on dramatic advances in information technology, ” in support of science and engineering applications. The development of collaboration environments based on “science portals ” plays an important role in achieving this cyberinfrastructure vision. While online, discipline-specific problem solving environments have been in use for many years, the attempt to create a common cyberinfrastructure for this purpose is a more recent development. In this paper, we address the current effort for building such a science collaboration portal as a joint effort between the GEON (GEOsciences Network) and NEES (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation) projects. In particular, we present recent work in developing portlets for providing access to computational simulation tools