Dr Chris Hines1
1Monash eResearch Centre, Clayton, Australia
Once upon a time, the CVL wanted to make graphical applications easy to use on HPC systems with big data storage. As part of this we created a simple tool that can be installed on many of the major operating systems that can setup ssh tunnels, initiate a vnc server and launch a vncviewer locally. This worked great, we hid all the machinations of using a batch scheduler and ssh tunnels from the user being a simple gui. We called this Strudel. Then a few years later someone suggested it would be really sweet if we could handle the whole thing from within a web browser. Thus was born Strudel-web. We made some neat hacks with strudel web. It used the same config files as Strudel (desktop). We also found a way to create short lived credentials and married this to OAuth2 and AAF authentication to make a general way for web apps to perform SSH Access. Strudel-web has been chugging along happily for a couple of years now, and we’ve learn a few lessons, and Strudel desktop even longer. In this talk I’ll talk about some of the things we’ve learnt and features we’re going to add to strudel v2 including
1. Alternative applications (like Jupyter notebooks)
2. Enhanced separation of configuration between batch scheduler and application
3. Unified codebase for both web and desktop applications
Please come along to hear about this tasty new solution
Biography:
Chris has been kicking around the eResearch sector for over a decade. He has a background in quantum physics and with the arrogance of physicists everywhere things this qualifies him to stick his big nose into topics he knows nothing about.