XSEDE16

July 18 – 21, 2016 (All Day)
  • InterContinental Miami Hotel

XSEDE's 5th annual conference will showcase the discoveries, innovations, challenges and achievements of those who utilize and support XSEDE resources and services. In keeping with this year's conference theme, and recognizing the diversity of scientific applications dealing with big data, the Globus team is investing heavily in educating developers within and beyond the XSEDE community on best practices for developing modern research data portals that meet the unique needs of researchers. We invite all developers to join us for a full-day tutorial that will demonstrate new Globus capabilities, and provide attendees with hands-on experience in working with the Globus platform APIs.

Tutorial: Tutorial: Building the Modern Research Data Portal Using the Globus Platform

Monday July 27, 2015, Time 8:00am - 5:00pm | Room Merrick I​

New Globus REST APIs, combined with high-speed networks and Science DMZs, create a research data platform on which developers can create entirely new classes of scientific applications, portals, and gateways. Globus is an established service that is widely used for managing research data on XSEDE and campus computing resources, and it continues to evolve with the addition of data publication capabilities, and improvements to the core data transfer and sharing functions. Over the past year we have added new identity and access management functionality that will simplify access to Globus using campus logins, and facilitate the integration of Globus, XSEDE, and other research services into web and mobile applications.

In this tutorial, we use real-world examples to show how these new technologies can be applied to realize immediately useful capabilities. Examples include the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Research Data Archive, which provides for high-speed delivery of research data to thousands of geoscientists; the Globus data portal, which provides for interactive data staging to/from experimental facilities and computing centers, and the publication of data generated at such facilities and centers; and the Advanced Photon Source data sharing system, used to distribute data from light source experiments. We explain how the Globus APIs provide intuitive access to authentication, authorization, sharing, transfer, and synchronization capabilities. Companion code (supplemented by iPython/Jupyter notebooks) will provide application skeletons that workshop participants can adapt to realize their own research data portals, science gateways, and other web applications that support research data workflows.

The tutorial will help participants answer these questions: How can XSEDE identities be used to access purpose-built web applications? How can researchers easily access the data stored in XSEDE, campus, community, and other repositories using performant, secure mechanisms? What services can science gateways and research portals offer their communities for managing large datasets more efficiently? How can such services be integrated with XSEDE resources and other existing campus computing infrastructure?

Note on prerequisites: This tutorial is geared towards developers of science gateways and portals for research communities. We expect attendees will have some familiarity with web application development (creating and managing HTTP GET, PUT, and POST requests/responses) and be knowledgeable in Python (although most of the capabilities presented will be accessible using other programming languages). An XSEDE account is desirable but not required.