elettra virtual collaboratory: the evolution of a virtual laboratory software from a simple web...

Elettra Virtual Collaboratory: the evolution of a Virtual Laboratory Software from a simple web application to the GRIDCC

Roberto Pugliese, Alessandro Busato, Alessio Curri, Enrico Mariotti, Daniele Favretto, Fulvio Billè, Roberto Borghes, Fabio Asnicar, Valentina Chenda,

Laura Del Cano, Lawrence Iviani, Michele Turcinovich

and the GRIDCC collaboration

Sincrotrone Trieste – ELETTRAInstruments and Sensors on the Grid

IEEE Conference on e-Science and Grid ComputingMelbourne, Australia, on 5-8 December 2005

Roberto [email protected]

Instruments and Sensors on the GridMelbourne, Australia, December 2005

Outline The Elettra Virtual Collaboratory (EVC)

EVC @ Work The BIOXHIT project

Virtual Collaborative System (VCS) The EUROTeV project

The Global Accelerator Network The Multipurpose Virtual Laboratory (MVL)

Evolving EVC to meet VCS and MVL requirements The GRIDCC project

The Multipurpose Collaborative Environment (MCE) Evolving EVC with MCE



What is a Collaboratory? The term “collaboratory” was coined by William

Wulf by merging the words collaboration and laboratory, and defined as “... Center without walls, in which researchers can perform their research without regard to geographical location - interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resource, and accessing information in digital libraries”.



What is a Collaboratory? In particular, the core capabilities that constitute a

collaboratory can be seen as technologies to link: People to people (e.g., electronic mail, and tools for data

conferencing, such as VRVS) People to information (e.g., the World Wide Web and digital

libraries) People to facilities (e.g., status of remote instruments) to

enhance utilization by expanding access to resources



What is the Elettra Virtual Collaboratory (EVC)?

EVC is an example of virtual laboratory, a system which allows a team of researchers distributed anywhere in the world to perform a complete experiment on the equipped beamlines and experimental stations of Elettra.

User atELETTRA

Team Memberat Home Lab

RemoteCollaborator

EquipmentControl Data CPU

COLLABORATORY



What is Elettra?



EVC usage scenarios:Cristallography “by mail” EVC allows biologists to send by mail protein crystals

which will be ananlized at the Xray Diffraction beamline by the beamline staff.

Collected data and resultsare accessible via EVC andresults can be downloadedas soon they are available.



EVC in action: a web portal

EVC is based onthe “web portal”metaphor

All you need is abrowser

EVC supports four different usercategories: Visitors Normal users Project leaders Staff



Collaborating to an EVC project

Scientists workingto an EVC projectcan use manyproject relatedcollaborationtools

EVC presents anadaptive interfacechanging to suitethe categoryand expertiselevel of the user



Collaboration Tools: EVC chat

EVC chat is“project centered”:there is a differentchannel for eachproject

Usual chat featureare extended inorder to allowexchange of Drawings scientific images graphical

annotations



Collaboration tools:scientific visualisation

Scientists canbrowse, visualiseand process remotelyscientific datain real-timeas soon asthe data is collected



Collaboration Tools: telepresence

The different videostreams of the equipped experimental stationscan be selected and viewed eventhrough a slowconnection

Movable camerascan be controlledvia web by theproject leader



Collaboration tools remote computing

Legacy software isnormally not web enabled

EVC uses VNCto web enablelegacy apps. It is small and

simple, sharableand open

Can be tunnelledvia ssh

VNC can be used asa fast integration tool



Collaboration Tools: Remote Beamline Control and Supervision

Beamwatchpresents asynoptic viewof the beamlines

Autorised peoplecan thus operateremotely onthe beamlineintrumentation



EVC Architecture EVC has 2 main components:

the application server and

a set of nodes

The application server is running the portal application, the user and project database; the application server activates actions implemented by agents running in the nodes or requests services to external systems

node1 node2 nodek-1 nodek

application server DB



EVC facts EVC project started on June 2001 and finished on June 2003.

The first prototype was installed on the Xray Diffraction beamline of ELETTRA on June 2002

EVC is now operating on all the beamline and experimental station of ELETTRA and acts as the web interface to the Elettra Scientific Computing Environment (instruments, computing farms, storage)

EVC was presented at SMAU2002, NOBUGS2002 and SMAU2003, HCI2003, NOBUGS2004

EVC development staff is partecipating in manyEU founded projects under FP6(BIOXHIT, IA-SFS/JRA1, GRIDCC, EUROTeV/GAN)



BIOXHIT Virtual Collaboratory System

The BIOXHIT project which will develop an integrated platform for high-throughput structure determination

ELETTRA is developing the Virtual Collaboratory System a Virtual Organization (VO) connecting all the European laboratories doing research in the field of structural genomics.



BIOXHIT VCS scenario

SupportingServices

VO user

VO user

crystallisation

beamline 1

beamline 2

beamline 3

ProcessingFarm

ProcessingFarm

DataStorage

VCS will be used to implement a widley distributed Virtual Organisation (VO) connecting all the stations and Laboratories involved in the BIOXHIT project



VCS Node @ EMBL-Hamburg



EUROTeV/GANMVL In the EUROTeV project the design study of the

International Linear Collider ELETTRA is developing the Multipurpose Virtual Laboratory, the core tool to implement the Global Accelerator Network, a VO connecting all the international laboratories doing research in the field of Accelerators.

Remote control of an accelerator facility has the potential of revolutionizing the mode of operation and the degree of exploitation of large experimental physics facilities.

The first prototype of the system planned by April 2005 will allow the remote control of ELETTRA storage ring from DESY.



MVL @ Work



www.lightsources.org



VCS/MVL Virtual Organisation



Evolving EVC to implement VCS / MVL In this architecture every institute in the VO should have a

VCS Node. The node can support more stations (e.g. a data collection station, a cristallisation, a control room station, a movable station etc). Stations can share resources and tools.

The remote collaborator will use his PC equipped with a web browser and if the case with a projector.

All the communication (AS-to-AS and AS-to-LN) is done via webservices secured with X.509 certificates by mutual authentication

Legacy applications are integrated using VNC if they do not have a web interface or ssh tunnels and proxy or redirection if they already have a web interface.



Evolving EVC to implement VCS / MVL All the communication between the Application Servers

located in the distributed laboratories is done via webservices (Axis implementation).

All the Local Nodes run a Local Node Server. Comunication between the AS and the LN is done via webservices (gSOAP implementation).

The systems are also equipped by a Management Station which allows easy configuration and maintenance via web browser.

VCS and can be considered a sort of integration platform. Scripts stored in the AS database are transferred to the local nodes, executed and the results returned to the user via the AS.



The GridCC Project

Instruments Grid Computational Grid+



GRIDCC project in 3 steps Development of generic Grid middleware, based on existing building

blocks (Grid Services) which will allow the remote control and monitoring instrumentation such as distributed systems.

Testing of the middleware on challenging applications to validate it both in terms of functionality and quality of service: European Power Grid Geo-hazards Remote Operation of an Accelerator Facility High Energy Physics Experiment …

Dissemination of the new software technology to encourage a wide range of enterprises to evaluate and adopt our Grid-oriented approach to real-time control and monitoring of remote instrumentation.



The MCE and the GRIDCC landscape

SupportingServices

VirtualCtrl. Room

VirtualCtrl. Room

Diagnostics

Instrument 1

Instrument 2

Instrument 3

The MCE is a software to implement Virtual Control Rooms, i.e., multi-user, collaboration-supporting interfaces to a widely distributed control system with access to grid-enabled computing and data storage facilities

StorageStorageElementElement

ComputingComputingElementElement



GridCC ArchitectureInformation

MonitorService

ComputingElement

ComputingElement

ComputingElement

StorageElements

StorageElements

StorageElementGlobalProblemSolver

Virtual Control Room

Virtual Control Room

Security

Service AutSTGSPolR

Instrument

Element

Instrument

Element

Instrument

Element

Collaborative

Service

Exe

c.

Ser

vice

WfM

SW

MS

Agr

S



The Multipurpose Collaborative Environment

a groupware providing general purpose services and interfaces to support collaboration among researchers and operators, to control remote instrumentation, and other tasks related with experimental activities

will be used to implement the VCR for the different GRIDCC pilot applications through customization and integration with application-specific services.

based on a core groupware application (providing, e.g., authentication, management of the VO users and instruments) and a set of plug-ins: General purpose (e.g., chat, notebook, video conference) Specific to the particular application (e.g., accelerator control,

specific instrument control)



Design and Development Approach State of the art evaluation

Collaboration support tools for scientific experimental activities

Available technologies Derivation of general requirements

through use cases, interviews, exchanges with other related projects (e.g., EUROTeV)

Prototyping Discussions over interface sketches Incremental development of functional prototypes



Design Choices Web-based portal interface

no installation, porting, clients available almost anywhere Minimal system requirements: Web browser, JRE for applets

Exploit portlet technology Why? manageable integration of application-specific

functionalities within the MCE Current prototypes are based on a modified version of the

GridSphere framework, developed under the GridLab EU project Collaboration with the GridSphere team to extend and improve

the framework to our needs was established and some of our developments are already in GridSphere codebase



Login page



Personalisation



eLogbook



VO view: people browser and chat



Resource browser and Instrument control



More Instruments Control



Video/Phone Conference: VRVS/Skype



Desktop Sharing



Execution Services: job submission



Execution Services: File Access



Evolving EVC with MCE EVC project started in 2001 and has now more

than 4 years of operations EVC software has been improved in these years

moving from a simple single facility web application to a multi-facility integration platform based on webservices

We are currently refactoring EVC in order to migrate to the GRIDCC MCE middleware.



GRIDCC Architecture

IE

VCR

IE

ExeS

IECE IESE

IMS

SecS

PS

VCR

WfMS

WMS

AgrS

AutS

TGS

PolR

VIGSACM

IM DMIMSpx

RSLPS

CollabS

elettra virtual collaboratory: the evolution of a virtual laboratory software from a simple web...

Documents

grid melbourne

gridcc roberto pugliese

mail evc

grid computing melbourne

roberto borghes

mce slide

term collaboratory

virtual laboratory software