Many research codes assume a user’s proficiency with high-performance computing tools, which often hinders their adoption by a community of users. Our goal is to create a user-friendly gateway to allow such users to leverage new capabilities brought forward to the fracture mechanics community by the phase-field approach to fracture, implemented in the open source code vDef.
We leveraged popular existing tools for building such frameworks: Agave, Django, and Docker, to build a Science Gateway that allows a user to submit a large number of jobs at once. We use the Agave framework to run jobs and handle all communications with the high-performance computers, as well as data sharing and tracking of provenance. Django was used to create a web application. Docker provided an easily deployable image of the system, simplifying setup by the user.
The result is a system that masks all interactions with the high-performance computing environment and provides a graphical interface that makes sense for scientists. In the common situation of parameter sweeps our gateway also helps the scientists comparing outputs of various computations using a matrix view that links to individual computations.
