PET FOCUSED EFFORT PROPOSAL

Focused Effort Title: Tango for Collaboration and Distance Consulting

Thematic Area(s): HPC Training and DoD User Productivity

PI Name: David Bernholdt

PI EMail Address: bernhold@npac.syr.edu

PI Telephone:	315 443 3857
PI Fax:		315 443 1973

Project Description:

The Tango collaboration system has been used successfully in another
CEWES Focused Effort to support collaboration in the form of remote
classroom instruction, demonstrating the efficacy of such a system for
use within the DoD.  This proposal seeks to further extend the
application of the Tango collaborative framework to another area of
great importance to the DoD and the PET program: technical
collaboration among geographically distributed groups, especially in
the area of HPCC software development and consulting (i.e. PET or MSRC
staff working with remote HPCC users).

Tango already includes basic collaborative tools, such as audio/video
conferencing, shared whiteboard, chat tool, etc.  This project will
augment the system with tools necessary to support software
development, performance improvement, and related activities.

Early work will include detailed training in the operation and
maintenance of the Tango server for an appropriate CEWES staffer and
installation of the basic Tango system (including server) at CEWES
making it available to MSRC users for basic collaboration.
Development of the additional tools will be done in cooperation with
an appropriate group (to be identified), and at the end of the
project, the entire system will be available for general use.

Benefits:

This project represents a further step in trying to reduce the
"importance of place" in access to MSRC resources and MSRC and PET
services, as well as in DoD research efforts as a whole.

Deliverables:

* Tango server will be deployed on a suitable host at CEWES
* Training in the operation and maintenance of the Tango server will
  be provided at Syracuse University
* A training at CEWES to familiarize users with the operation and use
  of the Tango system.
* Enhancements to Tango suitable for collaborative software
  development and consulting, including
  * Shared source code viewer/modifier: we will develop a
    collaborative version of emacs, a public domain editor with very
    strong support for code developers.We will provide extensions for
    collaborative viewing/editing and extend support for a versioning to
    synchronous collaborative mode.  Emacs support for the basic
    development cycle (code - compile - execute - debug) will be extended
    to the collaborative mode so that all these steps can be shared by all
    team members.
  * Shared flow diagramming tool: we will extend functionality of our
    shared whiteboards to fully object-oriented, editable, shared drawing
    tool. This tool will enable users to work on graphical representations
    of their computational processes, such as flow diagrams and entity
    relationships models.
  * Shared debugger: we will implement a tool allowing for distribution of
    the results of a code debugger, either real-time or post-mortem.
  * Shared numerical results visualizer: we will provide the infrastructure
    supporting shared, distributed, real-time visualization of the
    numerical results produced by codes running on HPCC platforms. The
    framework will consist of a runtime for transparent, distributed
    visualization and of the application programmer interface allowing for
    an easy hookup of the codes to the visualization system. The runtime
    will provide a reach set of numerical filters and the store-and-animate
    capability for analyzing code numerical stability or for tracing
    numerical convergence processes. A prototype of such a tool has been
    already implemented in NPAC. Written entirely in Java, the framework is
    extremely portable and easy to use.
  * Java MPI performance visualization: we will study the feasibility
    of building a sharable, distributed interface to the tools
    providing basic performance metrics of HPCC platforms.  We will
    select the most promising performance visulaization packages from
    among public domain systems such as AIMS from NASA or Pablo from
    University of Illinois, or commercial systems such as Datametrix,
    IBM perfmon, or SGI Co-Pilot.

Customer Commitment/Involvement:

CEWES has already expressed a desire for a full-scale Tango
installation (including server), and for training in the care and
feeding of such a system.  This project also requires a group willing
to help with the design and testing of the new remote
consulting/software development tools for Tango, but there are many
candidates and we do not anticiapte problems identifying a suitable
candidate.