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 listingDetailed 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 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