UltraScan gateway enhancements: in collaboration with TeraGrid advanced user support

Abstract

The Ultrascan gateway provides a user friendly web interface for evaluation of experimental analytical ultracentrifuge data using the UltraScan modeling software. The analysis tasks are executed on the TeraGrid and campus computational resources. The gateway is highly successful in providing the service to end users and consistently listed among the top five gateway community account usage. This continued growth and challenges of sustainability needed additional support to revisit the job management architecture. In this paper we describe the enhancements to the Ultrascan gateway middleware infrastructure provided through the TeraGrid Advanced User Support program. The advanced support efforts primarily focused on a) expanding the TeraGrid resources incorporate new machines; b) upgrading UltraScan's job management interfaces to use GRAM5 in place of the deprecated WS-GRAM; c) providing realistic usage scenarios to the GRAM5 and INCA resource testing and monitoring teams; d) creating general-purpose, resource-specific, and UltraScan-specific error handling and fault tolerance strategies; and e) providing forward and backward compatibility for the job management system between UltraScan's version 2 (currently in production) and version 3 (expected to be released mid-2011).