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