The NPAC Infosystem under Mosaic

Converting your Supercomputing '93 project summary to HTML

• SUMMARY
• PARTICIPANTS,
• CONTACTS
• IMPACT
• DESCRIPTION
• REFERENCES
• a picture if you have one

N.B. Once I'd done this for one project summary, using the template to convert another summary to HTML took me less than 10 minutes. This is very easy to do, especially if you have an example to work with. In fact it's so easy, you could even get one of your graduate students to do it!

If you want to learn more about HTML (although it should not necessary be here, since you can just use my template), there is an A Beginner's Guide to HTML and a Style Guide for Online Hypertext available from NCSA and CERN.

A simple project summary template can be found in ~paulc/NPAC/projects/nimo/home.html, for the NiMo project. You can also look at the home page for computational physics, in ~paulc/NPAC/projects/physics/home.html. Since there are three different computational physics projects that were described in the SC'93 overview, I have hyperlinks from the physics home page to pages for each of these projects. This approach could be used for large projects such as Fortran, that have many different sub-projects.

If you want to see how these look under Mosaic, here they are:

• NiMo project
• Computational physics projects

If you have any questions on any of this, talk to me or Roman or Nancy. If you don't have a copy of your SC'93 project summaries, see Rich, who has them all collected together. He will also be able to get you any extra stuff that he might have included.

There are only 3 things you need to remember in using the template:

1. Put HTML paragraph markers <p> at the end of each paragraph in the project description.

2. HTML only accepts gif format for inlined images. So if your picture is in some other format, e.g. postscript, you will have to convert it. Converting postscript to gif can be done as follows. If you have a file image.ps, type the following commands:

   gs /usr/local/lib/ghostscript/pstoppm.ps
   GS>(image) ppm24run
   GS>quit
   

   ppm24run is for 24-bit color images. If you have greyscale you could use ppm8run and get a smaller image file, I think. I used ppm1run on a black-and-white picture and it worked fine. Note however that some fancy fonts won't be converted properly if you have to convert from postscript, since gs doesn't know too many fonts.

   This procedure creates a file called image.ppm. Now start up xv:

   xv image.ppm
   

   and with the cursor inside the image, click on the right mouse button to put up the xv control panel. SAVE the image to gif format.

   Note that xv is an incredibly useful program. It will allow you to do screen capture (GRAB), crop images (autocrop or using GRAB), rotate them, change the colors, resize them, etc etc etc.

3. If you look at the summary of the computational physics project on simulations of spin models, you will find that the references have hyperlinks to SCCS documents stored on the NPAC ftp server, i.e. if you click on the SCCS number, the postscript file for that paper will be displayed in ghostscript.

   We are planning to make a subset of the SCCS reports available on-line. To get one of your papers placed onto the ftp site, you will need to fill out an electronic form with all the information on the paper (so that this can go into the SCCS documents database), including where the electronic version resides so Cherie can copy it over into the appropriate directory. However the details for doing this are still being worked out. We will keep you posted on this. We will probably set up a tentative scheme and ask for comments. Also you probably shouldn't set up hyperlinks to on-line SCCS documents just yet, since the directory structure in which they are stored will change, so you would have to go back and change all your hyperlinks.

   In the summary of the computational physics project on disordered systems, you will find that in the references there is a hyperlink to a paper stored remotely, on a physics preprint server in Italy. You could also do something like that, if some of your references are external reports stored on remote ftp sites.

The NPAC Mosaic servers:

1. An "official" server that the world will have access to, and thus has some security constraints. This is run on minerva, and all documents must be copied into the area accessed by this server by the person in charge of running the server (yet to be decided). There is no access to user directories, and users cannot directly add anything to this server.
2. An "experimental" server that is run out of Roman's directory, and that Roman organizes. This is not announced to the world, and is accessible only from the .syr.edu (in some cases only .npac.syr.edu) domains. This server has access to user directories, so anyone can add stuff to it once they have a home page in their directory linked with this server. To set this up, you should email Roman (roman@npac) with the name of the file that is the HTML home page for the project, and give the name that you want for the link that people will click on to access this page, e.g. My Really Wonderful Project. To make it easier for Roman and others to cross-reference and link to your files, it would be preferable if you could create a directory 'public_html' in your home directory for your HTML documents (or at least the home pages). You can access the experimental server by typing

    Mosaic http://www:1202 

   If you browse through this, you should be able to find the links to the NPAC projects, and project summaries from me and Nancy.

      Mosaic home.html

A few other points of note:

• Some of the project summaries may have cross-references to other projects (note that in my spin models summary I have a cross-reference to the HPF/F90D benchmark suite). In order for this to work, everyone needs to know the pathname for pages of other projects. This will be co-ordinated when all the project summaries are in and the general plan of the server is more mature.

• Under Mosaic we don't have the constraint that all the project summaries be less than a page, so extra info could be included, although since these are general overviews they should probably be kept as short as possible. However you can include hyperlinks to other information about the project. In two of the computational physics projects, random surfaces and spin models, I have included hyperlinks to pages that show some visualizations. I also have some pretty lame attempts to basically show what should be animations by using a series of still pictures. Hopefully I can make some real movies at a later date.

• If the gif of your picture is very large, it may take a long time to display it under Mosaic. What you can do in that case is to have a thumbnail image in-lined in the document, so that if people click on this smaller image, it spawns a viewer (xv or ghostscript) to display the large image. (To quit xv type 'q' with the cursor on the image.) Here is an example of a thumbnail image:

  Click on the image to see a larger version.

  To see how HTML is used to produce this thumbnail, you can view the source of this file (i.e. the standard ASCII file) by looking in the FILE options at the top left of the Mosaic window, and going to the VIEW SOURCE option, or else just look at ~paulc/NPAC/infosystem/summaries.html

  A thumbnail image can be created by either resizing under xv, or by using the postscript to gif conversion procedure described above with one extra command to set the size of the image:

     gs /usr/local/lib/ghostscript/pstoppm.ps
     GS> 10 10 ppmsetdensity
     GS> (image) ppm24run
     GS>quit