1. Focused Effort Title: Collaborative Portals for Training and Computational Science
  2. Organization: Florida State University
  3. Thematic Area: HPC Training and DoD User Productivity
  4. PI Names: Dr. David Bernholdt, Prof. Geoffrey Fox
  5. E-Mail: bernhold@npac.syr.edu, gcf@cs.fsu.edu
  6. Telephone: (315) 443-3857, (850) 644-4587
  7. Fax: (315) 443-1943, (850) 644-0098
  8. Statement of Work:
  9. We are proposing two focused efforts supporting these ideas; one described here is aimed at a prototype "betterportalML" as part of Communication and Collaboration; the second is aimed at a prototype event service as part of Training. Both technologies will be useable in either type of portal. We are also partnering with other PET partners in multi-institution focused efforts that are applications that will use and thereby test these technologies.

    The new portal architecture has one very important goal ­ enable users to build new portals very quickly. The result of this focused effort will be both a draft specification of betterportalML but also a prototype "portal construction wizard" that would allow users to choose the objects (and object parameters including layout and collaborative structure) and personal server services and so generate a betterportalML specification of their computing portal. Our idea is that "computer scientists" develop distributed system infrastructure, and services. Application scientists define objects (programs, data sets, resources) and can use default or customize portals that use the objects and services. Currently (as in LMS), computer scientists are needed every time one needs a new portal -- in the new approach, application scientists or their staff can build their own portals and define their own objects. New computer science work is only needed when bugs need to be fixed or improved or new services required. Hewlett Packard marketing says that e- Speak is designed to cut construction time of e-commerce sites to 2 hours (a factor of 100 reduction they claim). This focused effort has a similar goal for computing portals. The betterportalML will incorporate the lessons from our year-4 collaborative computing focused effort in terms of XML specification for asynchronous and synchronous collaboration.

    In this focused effort, the goal is to build two portal capabilities of relevance to education and training. The result of this will be a system that can be used in teaching the same type of material used today but in much more robust environment that supports both asynchronous and synchronous learning. We intend to test the new capability in "collaborative tutorials" offered at ERDC -- initially using tutorials offered by FSU as part of core technology effort. We note that we cannot realistically "quickly replace" systems like TangoInteractive, which have a rich set of capabilities developed over many years. Rather we focus on the most important aspects of a Tango session and address these. We think that the two most important aspects of any collaborative training session are the Audio-Video conferencing (discussed separately) and shared curricula (documents). We anticipate using existing TangoInteractive or other systems to support shared chat rooms, instant messenger and whiteboards.

    The heart of the new portal architecture is a robust queued event system that replaces the server in the TangoInteractive approach. This concept is used to integrate asynchronous and synchronous collaboration and to support automatic system archiving. We will in first 6 months of this FE develop such a prototype system, which will federate events between the "personal servers" of the new portal architecture. Eventually this event service will support "all types of objects" (audio-video messages, chat rooms, hand-held prompts, chat-rooms, user customization, server side notification etc.). In this FE, we will aim at two important event capabilities. Firstly the events needed to support the separate "Hand-Held HPC access FE" and then the harder case of events needed to support both shared pages and tele-pointers for distance learning. This will re-use some of the ideas and perhaps code developed for the "JavaScript Shared Browser" in TangoInteractive. However rather the fragile JavaScript system implemented in TangoInteractive, we will minimize the browser code and place all the logic on the robust high performance personal server. This will of course make it possible to experiment with hand-held devices driven by the same personal server. This will allow the type of collaborative session developed this year as part of "MicroTango FE" but with the new portal architecture.

  10. Deliverables: