Content with Resources Webinar .
Using Tapis: APIs for Portable, Reproducible High Performance Computing in the Cloud
January 8, 2020
Using Tapis: APIs for Portable, Reproducible High Performance Computing in the Cloud
Presented by Julia Looney, Software Engineer, Cloud & Interactive Computing, and Richard Cardone, Research Engineering/Scientist Associate, Web & Cloud Services, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Part one of a series of webinars providing an introduction to a variety of gateway platforms that can be used for building new gateways.
This webinar considers the challenges of running computationally intensive and high throughput applications in a reproducible, easy-to-use manner. To reach the widest audience, web-based applications tailored to specific domains provide gateways for different user communities. To avoid duplication of effort, there's a clear need for a middleware layer that mediates between those web applications and backend systems, such as supercomputers, cloud-based clusters, mass storage systems, and databases. Tapis fills this middleware need with a set of authentication, authorization, data transfer, job management, and function execution services that can span multiple data centers and manage batch, interactive, and streaming jobs. This webinar provides an overview of the recently announced, NSF-funded, Tapis project.
Helpful links:
How to Support Gateways via Community Building: Join the Gateway Ambassadors
December 11, 2019
How to Support Gateways via Community Building: Join the Gateway Ambassadors
Presented by
- Sandra Gesing, Associate Research Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Computational Scientist, Center for Research Computing,
University of Notre Dame - Gwen Jacobs, Director of Cyberinfrastructure at University of Hawaii System, Co-Director of UH's Data Science Institute
- Julian Pistorius, Engineer, Research Computing and founder of ResBaz, University of Arizona
- Annelie Rugg, Director & Humanities CIO, UCLA
Successful gateways require a diverse set of skills--from software development to sustainability planning to research-domain knowledge. Unfortunately, many researchers and educators are not aware that gateway specialists and mature frameworks are available to help with creating a gateway. To solve this problem, the Gateway Ambassadors Program is building a community of community-builders to spread awareness.
The program's goal is to support Gateway Ambassadors who facilitate gateways by reaching out to their on-campus community, their distributed community, or their networks in general. You can join the program to be a community builder or join simply to stay informed and benefit from our collection of support materials.
This webinar will share some background about this new program and review some of the resources and support materials available through the program. For further inspiration, three panelists will share their experiences with creating unique research computing communities on their campuses.
Webinar Slides (Gesing)
Wedinar Slides (Pistorius)
Webinar Slides (Rugg)
Conceptualizing a US Research Software Sustainability Institute
November 13, 2019
Conceptualizing a US Research Software Sustainability Institute
Presented by Daniel S. Katz, Assistant Director for Scientific Software & Applications, NCSA; Research Associate Professor, CS & ECE & iSchool, University of Illinois
This webinar will talk about the need for a US Research Software Sustainability Institute, and the work we have been doing to bring together the community to demonstrate the need for such an institute, and to plan for what an institute ideally would do. We've held a number of workshops, run a survey, ethnographically studied a set of projects, and are planning a trial winter school. Based on these inputs, we're in the process of drafting an institute plan to deliver services to the community, including to gateway developers, and this webinar will discuss this draft plan.
Reproducible big data science: A case study in continuous FAIRness using Globus and Globus Genomics
October 9, 2019
Reproducible big data science: A case study in continuous FAIRness using Globus and Globus Genomics
Presented by Ravi Madduri, Scientist, Data and Learning, Argonne National Laboratory, and Senior Scientist, University of Chicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering
Big biomedical data create exciting opportunities for discovery but make it difficult to capture analyses and outputs in forms that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). In response, we describe tools that make it easy to capture, and assign identifiers to, data and code throughout the data lifecycle. We illustrate the use of these tools via a case study involving a multi-step analysis that creates an atlas of putative transcription factor binding sites from terabytes of ENCODE DNase I hypersensitive sites sequencing data. We show how the tools automate routine but complex tasks, capture analysis algorithms in understandable and reusable forms, and harness fast networks and powerful cloud computers to process data rapidly, all without sacrificing usability or reproducibility—thus ensuring that big data are not hard-to-(re)use data.
In this talk, we will describe the enhancements made to the Globus Genomics to support working with datasets referred to by minids, analyzing BagIt-based research objects called BDBags, and execution using software encapsulated using docker containers with unique identifiers. We will describe the tools and services developed to create end-to-end reproducible analysis pipelines while adhering to FAIR principles.
Additional Resources
- www.globusgenomics.org
- Reproducible big data science: A case study in continuous FAIRness
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/ journal.pone.0213013 - Globus Genomics has more general applicability to gateways serving other domains and types of big (or not-so-big) data in the service of reproducibility. Hear Ravi Madduri's answer to this question at 37:56 into the video: Can a science gateway that offers computational resources but not long-term storage of users' data use/add your framework to offer some of the needed information to the user for reproducibility? Do we need to add the code to our gateway or can we call your REST API?
Webinar: Portable, Scalable Computation with Containers and Abaco Functions
September 11, 2019
Portable, Scalable Computation with Containers and Abaco Functions
Presented by Joe Stubbs, Research Associate and Lead of Cloud and Interactive Computing Group, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas, Austin
Linux container technologies such as Docker have made it easier than ever to package and move applications from one computing environment to another. In the last five or so years, a new cloud computing model called “Functions-as-a-Service” (FaaS) has started to gain traction for the way it can reduce the maintenance associated with deploying and scaling application components. In this webinar, we will discuss the primary concepts of FaaS and introduce the Abaco API platform, hosted at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Abaco (Actor Based Containers) is an NSF-funded project to provide a Functions-as-a-Service platform based on Docker containers and the Actor Model of Concurrent Computation to researchers. After an introduction, we’ll walk through an example of packaging, deploying, and scaling a Tensorflow image classifier on the Abaco cloud. Some prior familiarity with Docker and HTTP/Rest APIs would be helpful, though not strictly required.