Enabling User Driven Web Applications on Remote Computing Resource

Abstract

While CI providers have continued success with the infrastructure-as-a-service model (IaaS), there are increasing demands to offer more user driven service models from domain scientists. We propose a user driven web application that empowers users to run their interactive analytic tasks using CI resources dynamically. Ad-hoc analysis routines can be described with multiple pre-defined task modules in a configuration file that can be shared and re-used. A user can run the web application on CI resource without alleviated privilege or additional service deployment by administrators. The functions and user interface of the web application are automatically initialized based on the configuration file. Therefore, the framework offers a new way for a user to access and utilize remote resources. This new model can effectively reduce the access barrier to remote computing resource offered by CI. In this paper, we describe the proposed architecture of this framework and give a use case example.