The growth in the capacity and capability of NAND Flash based storage systems have changed the face of data oriented computational systems. These systems have become both more capable and flexible in how they are used. With these changes comes both increased potential and user complexity. While many systems attempt to hide this complexity through the addition of more layers of storage caches, the design of the Wrangler system went a different route, choosing instead to build a simple yet flexible web based interface to allow users to easily configure this complex data computing system based on their service and software needs. This allows users to work in the environments best suited to their workflows while optimally utilizing the systems high performance and high capacity storage systems. This interface also allows users to schedule long term periods of reserved capacity, "data campaigns", for projects. Finally, the system has been designed to support the data storage and sharing capacities of the system to enable these key aspects of data research. We discuss the capabilities with respect to three already existing workflows on the system to highlight the diversity and flexibility provided by this environment to data researchers.

Summary This paper describes the WeFold gateway that provides a social and technical environment for the first large‐scale attempt at collaboration within the context of the Critical Assessment of techniques for protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. CASP is a biennial worldwide experiment created 20 years ago to advance the field of protein folding, one of the grand challenges in modern science. The WeFold experiment was started in CASP10 (the 10th CASP) to bring together scientists from different disciplines to brainstorm online, share ideas and codes, and synergistically develop new methodologies. The goal is to positively shake up the field to stimulate breakthrough advances. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Summary Araport is an open‐source, online community resource for research on the Arabidopsis thaliana genome and related data. Araport is developed through a partnership between J. Craig Venter Institute, the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Cambridge. Part of the open architecture of Araport is the Science Applications Workspace. Taking an ‘app store’ approach, users can choose applications developed both by the Araport team and community developers to create a customized environment for their work. Araport also provides tooling and support for developing applications for Araport, including an application generator, a rapid development and testing tool, and a straightforward deployment path for publishing applications into the Araport workspace. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARY The Texas Advanced Computing Center provides a variety of high‐end resources to state, national, and international computational scientists and engineers. Many users obtain information about these resources via the Texas Advanced Computing Center user interfaces, which are supported by an information gathering and distribution infrastructure. After a number of years of use, we needed to improve our user interfaces by both redesigning the web interface and adding mobile interfaces. To support this, we also needed to update our information infrastructure. This paper presents our new design, describes how it improves over the previous approach, and shows that this design meets our current and expected future needs. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper describes the WeFold gateway that provides a social and technical environment for the first large-scale attempt at collaboration within the context of the Critical Assessment of techniques for protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competition. CASP is a biennial worldwide experiment created 20 years ago to advance the field of protein folding, one of the grand challenges in modern science. The WeFold experiment was started in CASP10 (the 10thCASP) to bring together scientists from different disciplines to brainstorm online, share ideas and codes, and synergistically develop new methodologies. The goal is to positively shake up the field to stimulate breakthrough advances.

Scientific visualization is the process of transforming raw numeric data into a visual form, and is a key element of computational science. While many tools exist, they are unnecessarily difficult to use. This complexity increases time to insight and inhibits casual inquiry. The complexity derives from the need to support arbitrarily formatted data and many visualization algorithms. EnVision addresses both sources of complexity. Its design is predicated on two key insights. First, though the number of data file formats is unbounded, the structure of any one can be described using a small number of parameters. Second, the set of visualization algorithms applicable to a given type of data is small, and the subset used within a specific scientific discipline is smaller. EnVision utilizes domain-specific knowledge and user-directed semi-automation to dramatically simplify data importation and visualization algorithm selection. Its Web-based interface facilitates access to remote hardware resources and provides a collaborative visualization environment.

Computational portal developers often reimplement functionality found in existing portals because there are no common discovery and access mechanisms in place to enable sharing of portal functions. The Web services architecture provides an implementation independent, protocol based mechanism for entities to find, share, and invoke remote services. We developed complementary web services at SDSC and IU that generate batch scripts for different batch queuing schedulers.

Computational web portals are designed to simplify access to diverse sets of high performance computing resources, typically through an interface to computational Grid tools. An important shortcoming of these portals is their lack of interoperable and reusable services. This paper presents an overview of research efforts undertaken by our group to build interoperating portal services around a Web Services model. We present a comprehensive view of an interoperable portal architecture, beginning with core portal services that can be used to build Application Web Services, which in turn may be aggregated and managed through portlet containers.

Abstract The Perl Commodity Grid Toolkit (Perl CoG Kit) is a software project aimed at bringing the complexities and power of the computational Grid to developers of Perl applications. In this paper we describe the history and motivation of the project, the benefits of bringing the Grid to Perl developers, the architecture and status of the Perl CoG Kit and the future plans for the project. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract The implementation of multiple Grid computing portals has led us to develop a methodology for Grid portal development that facilitates rapid prototyping and building of portals. Based on the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) Grid Portal Toolkit (GridPort) and the NPACI HotPage, all portals inherit interactive Grid services, share a single account and login environment, and share the infrastructure required to support and provide services used by each portal. We have demonstrated that the GridPort software can be used in production application portal environments, that the software can be configured to extend multiple sites. In this paper, we describe our experiences gained in building Grid portals and developing software for the Grid. We describe the architecture and design of the portal system, Grid services and systems employed, as well as the unique features of the system. We present descriptions of several application portals and the driving design choices. Finally, we discuss the new and emerging architecture system that being studied based on the Web services architecture. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Grid portals are emerging as convenient mechanisms for providing the scientific community with familiar and simplified interfaces to the Grid. Our experience in implementing Grid portals has led to the creation of GridPort: a unique, layered software system for building Grid portals. This system has several unique features: the software is portable and runs on most Web servers; written in Perl/CGI, it is easy to support and modify; it is flexible and adaptable; it supports single login between multiple portals; and portals built with it may run across multiple sites and organizations. The feasibility of this portal system has been successfully demonstrated with the implementation of several application portals. We describe our experiences in building this system, including philosophy and design choices. We explain the toolkits we are building, and we demonstrate the benefits of this system with examples of several production portals. Finally, we discuss our experiences with Grid web service architectures.

The NPACI (National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure) HotPage is a user portal that provides views of a distributed set of high-performance computing (HPC) resources as either an integrated meta-system or as individual machines. These Web pages run on any Web browser, regardless of the system or geographical location, and are supported by secure, encrypted log-in sessions where authenticated users can access their HPC system accounts and perform basic computational tasks. We describe the development of the Grid Portals Toolkit (GridPort), which is based on the architecture developed for the HotPage, and provide computational scientists and application developers with a set of simple, modular services and tools that allow application-level, customized science portal development and that facilitate seamless Web-based access to distributed computational resources and Grid services.