14–18 Oct 2013
Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage
Europe/Amsterdam timezone

A browser based multi-user working environment for physicists

14 Oct 2013, 15:00
45m
Grote zaal (Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage)

Grote zaal

Amsterdam, Beurs van Berlage

Poster presentation Facilities, Production Infrastructures, Networking and Collaborative Tools Poster presentations

Speaker

Gero Müller (RWTH Aachen University)

Description

Many programs in experimental particle physics do not yet have a graphical interface, or demand strong platform and software requirements. With the most recent development of the VISPA project, we provide graphical interfaces to existing software programs and access to multiple computing clusters through standard web browsers. The scalable client-server system allows analyses to be performed in sizable teams, and disburdens the individual physicist from installing and maintaining a software environment. The VISPA graphical interfaces are implemented in HTML, JavaScript and extensions to the Python webserver. The webserver uses SSH and RPC to access user data, code and processes on remote sites. As example applications we present graphical interfaces for steering the reconstruction framework OFFLINE of the Pierre-Auger experiment, and the analysis development toolkit PXL. The browser based VISPA system was field-tested in bi-weekly homework of a third year physics course by more than 100 students. We discuss the system deployment and the evaluation by the students.

Primary authors

Christian Glaser (RWTH Aachen University) Dennis Klingebiel (RWTH Aachen University) Gero Müller (RWTH Aachen University) Marcel Rieger (RWTH Aachen University) Martin Erdmann (RWTH Aachen University) Martin Urban (RWTH Aachen University) Matthias Komm (RWTH Aachen University) Robert Fischer (RWTH Aachen University) Tobias Winchen (RWTH Aachen University)

Presentation materials