FAQs
Web Portals Will Keep HPC Customers Informed
By Dr. Robert Cromp and Randy Schauer
ARL MSRC customers will soon be able to launch and monitor their computational jobs through a Kerberos-savvy web portal, which will provide up-to-date customized information to users who are working at home or on travel.
By January 2004, the portal should permit users to submit, monitor, modify and delete jobs, as well as upload and download files in their home and archive directories.
Numerous web portals exist within the DoD, including Knowledge Online portals for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Guard. The PET Online Knowledge Center is a web portal that provides customized information on PET-related projects, training classes and mailings relevant to specific computational functional areas (see https://okc.erdc.hpc.mil/index.jsp). The Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) has long recognized the utility of web portals - read an on-line description of their teraweb implementation in the Summer 1998 issue of the AHPCRC Bulletin at http://www.ahpcrc.org/publications/archives/v8n3.
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| ARL MSRC customers will be able to monitor their computational jobs via web portals. |
Additionally, check out the portal at http://hotpage.paci.org, which provides access to a computational grid being developed as part of the National Science Foundation's Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure project (PACI). PACI was created in 1997 to help develop the necessary information infrastructure to support high end computation. Organizations within PACI include the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The PACI portal gives users information on machine status and load, queue activity, and archive systems, plus it allows users to access and manipulate their files and data, and to submit, monitor, and delete jobs.
The ARL MSRC web portal is built on top of several open source software packages developed by the Apache Software Foundation. These same packages have already been leveraged to allow users to review the status of their Remedy ARL MSRC Help Desk tickets (accessible through the ARL MSRC customer service page: http://www.arl.hpc.mil/userservices).
The Apache Web Server software established itself as the dominant choice among institutions in April 1996. As of October, Apache is actively used at 67% of sites, followed by Microsoft web servers running at 25 percent. (See the Web Server Survey at http://news.netcraft.com.)
This software is mature and robust, and hosted on a Sun Fire V100 server that is ideal for web hosting.
To access the portal, customers will need to perform their Kerberos authentication using their SecurID card. This will grant them a ticket allowing them to access their information on the MSRC systems for display in the portal.
The portal will allow authentication over an encrypted connection from anywhere by using secure socket layer encryption techniques embedded in any of today's popular web browsers. This will allow customers to check their job status and submit follow-up jobs even while away from the office, as long as they have their SecurID card available.
us to serve as pioneer users by sending email to msrcweb@arl.army.mil.