Virtual Research Environments:The Sakai VRE Demonstrator

Rob Allan, Xiaobo Yang, Rob Crouchley, Adrian Fish and Miguel Gonzalez

What is a Virtual Research Environment?A VRE is defined as a distributed way of working using a Web-based portal and for linking into users' desktop applications to access a wide and growing range of on-line tools. These include access to Grid based computing and data management systems as well as collaboration tools, some based on Web 2.0. A VRE is both a ``one-stop shop'' for academic users and a ``turnkey solution'' for commercial users.

These emerging characteristics of a VRE are increasingly overlaid with a requirement to provide support for the creation, further development, or enhancement of a research community in virtual space - a ``Virtual Research Community''. The OST (UK Office of Science and Technology) report of March 2006 indicated that VRCs have the potential to open exciting new opportunities to collaborate in research and thus realise significant gains at institutional, national and international levels.

In this talk we only consider Web based VREs using portal technology.

JISC VRE-1 Sakai Demonstrator•JISC VRE-1 Programme – 2005-2007•4 partner sites: Daresbury, Lancaster, Oxford, Portsmouth (now

Reading)•Framework extensions

Security – Shibboleth WSRP JSR-168

•New tools, DMS, Agora, WSRP Consumer, Grid portlets, Blogger, Shared Whiteboard, Bridging tools, Semantic search tool

•Production portal for e-Research projects – currently some 400 users and 25 projects hosted.

http://rhine.dl.ac.uk:8080/portal

Classes of UserIn observing usage patterns we have seen the following:

1. Expert HPC user is happy to log on and develop applications

2. Semi-expert users like remote scripting interfaces

3. Novice users like generic portals to test the functionality

4. Application-based communities develop rich clients, e.g. desktop GUI

There is no single solution that will satisfy all the diverse requirements, but exposing a common set of underlying services and using standards to promote inter-operability can help. This is the key to rapid and agile application development, using and combining remote resources.

We are trying to use Sakai to combine a rich set of well-integrated internal services with more loosely integratedremote services.

Class of User Purpose Requires Concerns

End users (e.g.quantitative social

scientists).

Do research. Solveproblems.

Applications. Transparency, ease ofuse, performance.

Application developers. Develop new andextend existing

applications.

Programming tools,API's,libraries.

Ease of use, re-usability.

Tool developers. Develop API's, toolkits,libraries.

Grid services. Adaptivity,applicability,

robustness, stability.

Grid developers. Provide grid services. Local system services. Security, connectivity,

protocols.

System administrators. Manage grid resources. System tools. Balancing local and

global concerns.

Classification of Grid User(adapted from Foster and Kesselman)

Some Questions about VRE UsageDeployment and evaluation of such a VRE tests and extends our

understanding of practical IT-based support for research in the following areas:

•How can such frameworks be configured to best suit the expectations and work practices of different research user communities and institutional or organisational contexts?

•Can tools from multiple institutions and organisations be brought together coherently to enable sharing of information, processes and collaboration?

•Can community-specific tools be integrated meaningfully alongside generic and remotely-hosted Web tools?

•Can a portal-like approach provide the flexibility to enable effective use by both researchers and administrators?

•At what points are rich desktop tools or those provided by a mobile platform, more effective?

•How might these be best integrated to provide a meaningful user experience?

Portals and VREs

The idea of portals has been around for a number of years. We organised the Portals and Portlets 2003 Workshop in Edinburgh just at the time when two significant pieces of technology, the JSR-168 portlet standard and WSRP 1.0, Web Services for Remote Portlets standard, were being agreed. We organised a second Portals and Portlets Workshop in 2006.

Since 2003, a number of open-source and commercial portal projects have been launched and are in use for a variety of purposes. One example in the UK is the portal for the National Grid Service. This evolved from HPC Portal which was initially a Perl/ C based environment for launching and monitoring Grid jobs similar to the US GridPort and HotPage portals from San Diego Supercomputer Centre. After briefly using PHP technology we have now evolved to using JSR-168 portlets firstly in the GridSphere and StringBeans frameworks and more recently in uPortal and Sakai.

See Dave Meredith’s talk

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Science Gateways IA VRE is however more than just a portal. Whilst NGS Portal has a number of tools to encourage people to share artefacts, e.g. descriptions of computational tasks or workflows, it has very little built-in community support. It is important to address this if e-Science technologies and the Grid are going to be taken up more widely.

In the USA this is done through the concept of Science Gateways such as NEESit. A number of these science gateways are listed on the TeraGrid Web site.

Scientific gateways can have varying goals and implementations. Some expose specific sets of community codes so that anonymous scientists can run them. Others may serve as a "metaportal," a community portal that brings a broad range of new services and applications to the community. A common trait of all three types is their interaction with the TeraGrid through the various service interfaces that TeraGrid provides. Although the gateways may be instantiated on TeraGrid resources, it is expected that many will be instantiated on community resources and be administered by the community itself.

VREs and CWEsAccording to Wikipedia: a Collaborative Working Environment (CWE) supports people (e.g. E-professionals) in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves organisational, technical, and social issues. It lists tools or services which may be considered elements of a CWE including e-Mail, instant messaging, application sharing, video conferencing, collaborative workspace, document management, task and workflow management, Wiki and Blog. Access Grid is mentioned as being a particular type of CWE. It will be seen below that many of these tools have also been recognised as being important in our VRE development and are now available in Sakai. Not all this work is described here, in particular the important work on the Agora conferencing and desktop sharing tool from Lancaster University, was initially funded as part of the VRE Demonstrator and CQeSS project. This tool addresses the requirements of desktop-based video conferencing!

http://agora.lancs.ac.uk

AgoraAgora is an easy to use online meeting tool. With Agora you can take

your workplace with your laptop.•Video-conference: "many to many": Organised into virtual meeting

rooms, you can video-conference with an unlimited number of participants(*).

•Shared desktop: You can broadcast what you are watching on your desktop.

•Whiteboard: Collaborative whiteboard on which anybody can sketch.•Chat: Instant messaging

application.•Moviecasting:

Broadcast movies.•Session recording:

Record your sessions for further analysis.

Demos on Lancaster stand

Half Way House?•Sakai is not a portal, but has many portal-like characteristics and

similar look-and-feel.•Sakai supports a “Tool Portability Profile” enabling close integration

within the Sakai framework•Sakai uses many underlying standards•Sakai was designed as a Collaborative Learning Environment, so

also shares many aspects of CWEs•It is designed to be scalable, supporting 10,000s of users•Works with Oracle 10g•To enable interoperability with portal technologies we added a WSRP

Consumer tool to Sakai (there was already a Producer)•More recently a native JSR-168 interface has been added, based on

Pluto 1.1•Sakai tools can also be exposed in portals, such as uPortal, so Sakai

could be viewed as a Service Hosting Environment.•We think this is required for a VRE

Sakai as a VO Management ToolIn the terminology of Sakai, a VO maps onto a ``worksite''. Through

their worksites, bespoke tools can be made available to the VOs that require them. Each worksite can be customised to have a specific look-and-feel and configured to contain just the tools that are required by its members. This can include Web interfaces to distributed services managed by a particular project or hosted as part of a Grid resource.

•Sakai's internal VO management is through role-based policies. Users can be allocated roles within each worksite. Roles can be extended by administrative users from the small number of defaults like ``admin'‘ and ``maintain''.

•Certain users can configure new sites, and resources can be shared between sites.

•Other concepts include permissions, types, realms, skins, properties, groups, aliases.

•Sites can be public, private or joinable.

Roles and Permissions

Worksite Role

Front page(not logged in)

view only

My site maintain

Site 1 create

Site 2 maintain

Site 3 access

Site x – created from Site 1

maintain

Users see only what they have access to. Some additional worksites are “joinable”.

Each worksite provides a list of tools and view of underlying content depending on the user’s role

Managing Users and Tools

Built-in Web 2.0 ServicesFor the end users, Web 2.0 typically provides “hosted services”

enabling them to use a Web browser to interact with, contribute content to the Web and invoke remote operations.

There is a growing list of such tools which are being hosted in the Sakai server and database. They can be rendered as stand-alone pages or tiled in various combinations as required.

•Blog•Wiki•Calendar•Chat client•Message Center•Shared Resources•Announcements•Workshop paper management

•RSS News reader

•Glossary

•Threaded Discussion Forum

•Other tools mashup remote Web 2.0 services from Google, Yahoo, FaceBook, etc.

Wiki and Discussion Forum

Calendar and RSS News

My Workspace

Each user has a workspace which aggregates views of all the sites they belong to.

Web 2.0 – Map MashupRecently we have investigated how to augment the built-in Web 2.0 services by making use of the Yahoo! Maps Web Service. Such a Web API greatly alleviates the entry level of developing Web 2.0 for geo-spatial research applications. The services provide a set of APIs (AJAX or Flash) through which developers can easily access online maps around the world and overlay their own information (mashup).

What we have tested is to display a map of the Sakai Community similar to the one located at the Sakai Web site inside our VRE.

We expect this kind of mashup technology to be of use in a number of research fields such as archeology, flood monitoring and prediction, climate simulation and urban decision making in addition to supporting other forms of collaborative working, such as locating Access Grid rooms. Users will upload their data into “Resources/MapData” and then select which to overlay on the map.

Screenshot

Rollout, Sustainability and Community Sakai is running on a fully-supported IBM BladeCenter at Daresbury Laboratory currently with 28 dual-processor Xeon blades. The content is hosted in the Oracle 10g database on the UK National Grid Service (RAL node).

We are currently deploying fully-operational and supported Sakai-based VREs for the following communities:

NW-GRID: a community of computational scientists, both academic and commercial, using compute clusters in the North West of England.

ESRC e-Infrastructure: a community of multi-disciplinary social scientists thoughout the UK building a common infrastructure and adopting e-Science technology through the work of NCeSS and ReDReSS http://www.ncess.ac.uk and http://redress.lancs.ac.uk

Diamond e-Infrastructure: a community of experimental scientists using the new Diamond Light Source http://www.diamond.ac.uk the largest investment in science in the UK for 30 years.