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Open Science Grid
Science Gateways at NERSC
NERSC is actively building science gateways to allow for a richer set of interfaces to compute and data resources. The goal of these projects is to allow users to access their data, perform interesting computations and interact with the NERSC resources using web based interfaces and technologies. This makes it easier for scientists to use the NERSC center, while creating opportunities to build new collaborative tools to share this data with the rest of the scientific community.
Our approach is that there is no one size fits all solution for science gateways. We engage with science teams interested in using these new services, assist with deployment, accept feedback, and try to recycle sucessful approaches into methods that other teams can use. Below is a list of current projects and methods. Building blocks are available to NERSC users interested in creating new science gateways. If you would like to participate or have questions please contact help@nersc.gov.
Active Science Gateway Projects
Gateway Technologies
NERSC is also providing scientific groups with the building blocks to create their own science gateways and web interfaces into the NERSC center. Many of these interfaces are built on top of existing grid and web technologies.- Web Access Methods Science gateways can be configured to provide public unauthenticated access to data sets and services as well as authenticated access if needed. The following features are available to projects that wish to enable gateway access to their data through the web:
- Web access to NERSC Global Filesystem
- Modern "Web 2.0" interfaces with AJAX front-ends such as Google maps and visualization kits
- Full-featured backend programming environments including PHP, Python, Java (Glassfish and Tomcat)
- File browsers and Upload/Download tools.
- Databases and Active data tables
- SVN code hosting and online browsing
- Other features can be made available on request.
- Authentication Interfaces
- The authenticated gateway provides LDAP authentication by default (using the NERSC username/password) for all projects. Other authentication options can also be made available upon request.
- Additionally, web applications can transparently acquire a grid credential (using myproxy) from the NERSC certificate server, to access other NERSC resources through the File Transfer and Job Submission interfaces. These credentials are completely transparent for the end user.
- File Transfer Interfaces
- Access to all filesystems at NERSC through the web using grid data tools. The grid interfaces are completely transparent to the end user.
- Tools for serving data directly from HPSS
- Job Submission Interfaces
- Tools for submission and management of batch jobs/queues through grid interfaces (transparent to the end user).
- Tools for interactive job management through grid interfaces (transparent to the end user).
Getting Started:
You can publish your data through a publicly accessible URL by simply doing the following:- Log in to a NERSC resource to access the Global Filesystem on
/project/projectdirs:ssh portal-auth.nersc.govIn the above example, you can replace portal-auth with any other NERSC compute platform that has access to
/project, including franklin, bassi, pdsf, jacquard and davinci. - Create a
wwwdirectory in your project directory:mkdir /project/projectdirs/yourproject/www - Make sure your project directory and the www directory are world readable:
chmod 755 /project/projectdirs/yourproject/
chmod 755 /project/projectdirs/yourproject/www - Copy your data to this
wwwdirectory. Any public data will need to be world readable. - Add PHP and HTML files to this directory to build custom gateway interfaces to the data
- Any data under
/project/projectdirs/yourproject/wwwwill be publicly accessible through http://portal.nersc.gov/project/yourproject/
