Isuru Ranawaka

Software-as-a-service science gateways provide user interfaces and middleware for accessing scientific software deployed on remote high-performance computing resources and clusters. Selecting the resource to use for a particular job submission may be left to the user, who may need more information to make good choices when selecting from multiple options. To address this problem, we have designed and developed an extensible, scalable metascheduling system that can provide automated scheduling capabilities based on resource availability and other characteristics. We develop a system model based on queuing theory to guide our implementation and provide a basis for analysis. In particular, we derive an efficiency metric from these considerations. We implement the metascheduling system within the open-source Apache Airavata framework for science gateways as a supplemental service for guiding the job submission capabilities. We measure efficiency in representative scenarios, observing efficiencies of greater than 70% even in scenarios with high input rates and low job acceptance rates.

Metadata catalogs are essential for enabling researchers to find and access relevant datasets. However, existing metadata catalog solutions have limitations, such as being domain-specific or using document-oriented databases that limit their scalability and flexibility. To address these issues, we introduce the Airavata Data Catalog - a multi-tenanted schema-free metadata catalog service that supports multiple domain-specific metadata schemas and access control mechanisms. This paper describes our approach to modeling the relational attributes of data products and their access control while supporting a schema-free, document-oriented approach to storing and searching metadata. Our approach offers significant improvements over existing solutions and demonstrates the feasibility of a scalable, flexible metadata catalog for scientific datasets.

This paper introduces Cybershuttle, a new type of user-facing cyberinfrastructure that provides seamless access to a range of resources for researchers, enhancing their productivity. The Cybershuttle Research Environment is built on open source Apache Airavata software and uses a hybrid approach that integrates locally deployed agent programs with centrally hosted middleware. This enables end-to-end integration of computational science and engineering research across a range of resources, including users’ local resources, centralized university computing and data resources, computational clouds, and NSF-funded national-scale computing centers. To ensure a user-centered approach, we have designed the scientific user environments with the best user-centered design practices.