Chemical Engineering and Chemistry Portals Meeting February 22, Argonne National Laboratory PARTICIPANTS Jay Alameda Geoffrey Fox Gregor von Laszewski Dennis Gannon Nell Rehn Jarek Gawor Peter Lane Darcey Quesnell Von Welch Lex Lane Madhu Govindaraju Nirmal Mukhi AGENDA Goals: delivering a work-plan to see what gets done by whom and when understand the application and the overall system. constraint: lets not do the same portal again after 6 month, deliver a reusable concept PREDISCUSSIONS Security * discussed shortly the myProxy delegation through web browser - encrypted key is on web server while using pass-phrase to decrypt it. - ssl is used to place private key remotely - a proxy private key is only valid for a particular time. habanero not shown using legacy code for controlling the application * input files are unchanged * develop a servlet that does it (develop methods that do setParameter getParameter ) This has the advantage of extending the framework to computational steering Question: are these good abstractions? Support old programs and different "new" programs. remember some programs can not be touched! majority of code is not changed. New strategy: how do we integrate new code. remember the science users may be FORTRAN programmers and not object oriented "freaks" (python, Java, C++, ...). how do support x number of viz packages. FIDAP postprocessor of fidap generates PS than convert to gif and display. it may not be important to do steering with immediate response. Open discussion ----- Do not run a lot of software in the browser. Do the minimum, in the browser. interact with a server running potentially. maybe we start application outside the browser, browsers are moving targets, development effort may be lost if we Question: should we have a local apache on my PC. * generic browser * plugin or server that can be downloaded to be installed on * machine - is this model acceptable to customer? - this may support hand-held and other devices - clear separation of rendering (GUI) and backend computing, normal 3-tier model. - client tier must be solid and simple environment. Not necessarily in a browser. - Question: what would be the difference to have stand alone application. * GUI is separated gui rendering tool local application server application server globus - architecture does not require significant software to run in browser. - event handling seems a major component of this framework. events must be simple SECURITY trade secret - strict problem controlling back-end applications and running on back-end solution leave strict security infrastructure up to local administrator. make sure that the connections to the servers from browsers and within browsers are secure. if total security is needed firewalls should be used by the administrator. the portal can not change an insecure infrastructure. all back-ends are potentially untrusted. is this an oversimplified view? Is this a non-issue? Database with appropriate security for portal management. which applications are being authorized to be used. access control list, - authorization to execute program (currently use UNIX group permissions) - suggest to change this to build a wrapper for authorization that queries database and has sophisticated tools for generating and controlling access control lists. - this must be real secure! if we want to do this remotely. - Akenti and MDS solve theoretically, but does it work practically and is this too much effort. - extend this from programs to have objects and acl restrictions on them ==================================================================================== INFORMATION MODEL GROUP what does a portal information service must contain? e.g. find and define appropriate PoratlInformationService? doe we need to define an API for this, if so who does it look? What is the object model and the service on this objects, caching, ... . (Reagan Moore, Gregor, Darcey, consult possibly with Vanderbilt, Dennis). GIS-WG should consider requirements of portals, video conferencing, ... This group should formulate a suggestion which is submitted to GIS-WG. Describe the model of a pager technologies: Rib, eXcelon, Oracle, WebDAV, ..., unstructured data. do not call it rib, call it PortalInformationSevice to get rid of old baggage. functionality of MDS is missing to support this effort eXelon someone must evaluate it compare this with xml apache database back-ends. compare this to directory services find out about distributed databases GNIF Hector Garcia-Molina GInF, ask for e-mail. ... find out more about it. Our contribution: Once XML of components is there produce parts that interact with the architecture/system. add event service to interrupt current application. Portals imply that computational science is done different from the way it has been done before. A Study what these changes are or could be would be important. - take advantage of collaborative infrastructure, grids, ..., ... ====================================================================== Models and Implementation ====================================================================== Object Model discuss the entities that are in the portal. this has to be done also on the science side. betterportalML (involve portal developers, ...) objects and their composition requirements: objects must have a global naming service for identification objects must be identified via a search service the later ones are provided by the Information Service logical layout language that specifies how the objects are laied out events language that describes the metadata of the events and can represent things such as change in states of objects services can be itself be objects that than can be monitored via events services (see GnIF as example, defines state machine and their interaction) tool for specifying services objects can be visualized debugged each object should have a service subtag describing the service such as viz, performance, execution, authentication, ... administration language/service that allows the administration of the portal Event Services (Dennis, Darcey, X. Peng, Gregor, ... ) *Watcher Event Service something we have not discussed in event services meeting: filter reacts upon specific patterns and throws events must support large number of clients. must be able to select a partial sets extremely fast define scalability in the context of an event service tree while increasing latency firewalls, events must go through some firewalls. what is a firewall, discuss this with the security group. specify what is necessary to let events through contact David Bernhardt for firewall issues and SOX there seem to be problems with SOX layoutPortalML, Browser rendering service targets hand held device and browsers. WML, XSL, XUL, ... what implication has this for the services and the event services. other things: what are implications for handheld devices. (David Bernholdt, Peter Lane, Jay, userPortals (Doug Fein) ) Portal Services Security access of data, authentication Doug Engert, Steve Tuecke, Von Welch, Jarek Gawor, Nell Rehn, Marlon Pierce(NPAC), (Gregor partial, Von: Kickers) moves to Florida. A report about the implications and when it will be ready. What about Kerberos, ... Formulate a mail to the group to see if this can be done also with Kerberos what is done with myProxy. Build a group that evaluated with DOE and DOD (Kerberos) what their input is. Gregor will provide a small mail digest about the ongoing myProxy security discussion, input from CMT, cactus, and chemportal group will be acquired Akenti, Bill, Mary .. Cliff Neuman, GAA (ISI) What implication has this for the overall infrastructure. Example CORBA and kerberos caused for Gateway a great pain. different roles for different people in a portal must be able to be expressed. Portal Information Service user, software, events databases/services repository for objects interfaces to components science component repository Generate an initial discussion that summarizes issues Jini, Ninja, ..., ... Implementation issues may have some implications on hwo the model is described. gaol what is the richest possible information service gregors comments: do we really need the richest? what is the minimal set of requirements we need XML technology ACTION: is technology x + y the right thing what is x,y = Nini, RIB, eXcelon, zope, ... see above notes on INFORMATION GROUP survey technology, get started, ... (Gannon is the Kicker! Nirmal, Gregor, Alek, Madhu, Darcey, Reagan Moore, RIB 1 month project, 3 weeks from now draft) invitation for comments. Desktop Services File Services, job submission, Gateway has lots of services, XML to compose tasks survey current implementations that have right features so that at one point we can start implementing them. goal identify these desktop services. (Geoffrey & co., Unicore, chemPortal, ... ) identify issues and needs. Composition Service CCAT and NPAC webflow. abstract what is done there (Geoffrey, Nirmal) Authoring Service what is in the portal , who can we put stuff in/out SWIG like ability fill out a form for components betterportalML customization of the service (myChemWorld) support of visual programming (Geoffrey, Jay, CCAT, ..) Interaction Service users must steer computation (Jay, Darcy, Gregor, Ruth) Collaboration Service this service uses the event service as base component. Geoffrey, Jackson (Habanero), Jay, learn from lesson The archiving service might be part of the collaborative service (replay events). using asynchronous event delivery. Archival service (Data Grid) Outreach work with user portals group to get them produce the right buttons for us(?). Develop a consistent security model between science portal and user portal. compile/make/ssh/debuggers ability compare to hotpage). (Gregor in collaboration with Mary Thomas, Doug Fein) Performance Service analyze who fast the program is running in which part where, .... (Ruth, Valery Taylor via Darcey (Gridforum) Architecture team where are objects and where are tools, abstract the computational science application does CCAT provide all we need. no. consider the proxy wrapper from webflow. (dataflow is a good model for component flow). pitfalls. General Architecture team (Dennis, Geoffrey) Take the substudies and join them together and interpret them Universal access Al Gilman. Educational Access Stevenson, Roscoe Tutoring Service, "Video Replay Service", will have impact on portal layout. Science wrapper team (Dennis, Jay, Marlon Pierce, rest of science team, Madhu) turn relevant procedures/programs into components filter mode (compare the CMT pipeline) scienceML - XSIL - CML - meshML (?) - gausianML(?) - SVG - pictureML - mathML - componentFlow meta data descriptions for gigantic files (compare CMT dont use HDF use XML) which components are destined for a science portal component repository make a compelling case. Visualization Service What commonalities are there to develop a vis common service? separate what is being visualized from the actual rendered (including sophisticated filters) Polly Baker, Jim Fenton, Bill Hibbard, Randy Heilan (Joe Insley?) The common portal architecture, A proposal (Goal end of April). SC DEMO XX SERVICE (SOMEONE ELSE THAN GREGOR) SOAP investigate (Darcey, Alek, Madhu) collect e-mail from all people mentioned here ldapsearch "&(objectlass=software)(name=FIDAP)(hostname=baldi*)" ================================================================ Overall Architecture -------------------- low level multi tier object models CORBA, DCOM, XML/SOAP, Java, medium level object models, JWORB, EJB, iplanet, webSphere, zope high level object models espeak, ninja portlets, linking XML to the web, interfaces from XML to databases. www.desktop.com lessons learned from NPAC: JAVA -> CORBA -> JWORB (?) Corba broker in Java does not support DCOM a multilingual broker (DCOM) Benjamin Temko ------------------------------------------------------------------ xmlblast, ..., syncML.org Task: Survey of commercial protal activities such as desktop.com General rule for all documents: comment on scalability if this applies! ========================================================= Introduction Computational Science in the World of Portals What is a portal What is computational science How doe portals influence a new way of comp. science (jay) [ Lessons learned from the past Tango, Habanero, Biology workbench, ... ] Architecture Objectmodel betterprotalML Portal Services Security Information Archive Desktop Composition ... Application Application specific services gausianML, ... Technology overviews overview identify some common criterion Meetings * end of April, draft must be distributed * one month from than