Cooperative Computing Group Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems Mississippi State University

SimPortal: Grid Portal for OpenSees

Tomasz Haupt
Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems Mississippi State University

Portal Developers: Anand Kalyanasundaram, Igor Zhuk

What is SimPortal?
The objective of SimPortal is to add a computational simulation component for the NEESit by providing a Grid Portal for the Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (OpenSees). The OpenSees graphical user interface (GUI) is implemented as a Java applet. The applet seamlessly communicates the NEEScentral to run the OpenSees simulations on remote computers (computational servers) designated by the NEEScentral administrator. (currently under development)

Advantages of a Portal:
no installation, automatic upgrades tools for generating and validating scripts seamless access to distributed data sets (ground motion data, NEESgrid repositories) integration with visualization tools seamless access to HPC resources

SimPortal Components
repository
SimPortal Applet
local file system

Share scripts and data across the community

workspace
Get scripts and data from the repository or your local disk and build OpenSees simulations Use portal tools to customize the simulations

job table
monitor your jobs access the results maintain provenance

job submission service

Run the simulations on computers provided by NEESit
(soon also High-Performance for parallel OpenSees)

Sequence of User Actions

Login to Portal Set the back-end credentials

Login to the portal and set the credentials To run a new simulation
Create a simulation in the workspace Upload the script and data either from your local file system or from the repository Modify the script and data as needed Submit job (selecting the target system and number of processors Wait until the simulation completes View std.out and std.err. If simulation completed correctly download the data Open the simulation in the workspace Modify the script as needed and submit it Wait until the simulation complete and download the results

Upload scripts and data to the repository

Create a simulation Populate the simulation with scripts and data from the repository

Download scripts and data from the repository

To run an existing simulation

Publish scripts and data

Edit Scripts

Submit Monitor the status Download results Publish results

To upload data and scripts to the repository or download scripts and data from the repository without opening or creating a simulation
Use the repository interface

Example Screen Shots: Workspace

Workspace: The user can organize his simulations into a tree

Example Screen Shots: Simulation

A simulation comprises a number of scripts and data files organized into folders. Each script can be viewed and edited. Syntax errors, if any, are detected.

Customizing a script (1)

A 3D model of the simulated structure is displayed. Click on the element of interest and a file that contains the definition of the element will be open and the code highlighted.

Customizing a script (2)

Modify the code in the editor and you can see the effect instantly.

Accessing Results
For each submitted job the user can view and download all output files, including the stdout and stderr. The results generated by node recoder can be animated in the portal as well. In addition, the provenance of the simulation is preserved: the scripts, input data and the value of parameters used for the run.

Standalone SimPortal

Standalone SimPortal
OpenSees and SimPortal are installed on the local machine. All scripts and datafiles are stored on the local machine.

Standalone SimPortal Installation (alpha)

Download and install OpenSees from the Berkeley OpenSees site. Install Java and Java3D. Download the binary package from neesforge: http://neesforge.nees.org/projects/simportal/ Configure SimPortal by editing ecs.standalone.properties for the OpenSees location, script storage location and run directory locations (described in the readme file). Start SimPortal using the provided runscript.

Current Status
The portal is deployed at
http://neesphere.sdsc.edu

Off-line Standalone SimPortal

http://neesforge.nees.org/projects/simportal/

Contact: Tomasz Haupt haupt@cavs.msstate.edu Anand Kalyanasundaram anand@cavs.msstate.edu

Current Status
We are gathering the feedback for early users
Already we got suggestions for making the interface more user friendly Already we got suggestions for new features to be added

We are integrating the SimPortal with NEEScentral We are working on providing support for running parallel OpenSees on High-Performance systems provided by NEES (SDSC and TeraGrid)

Cooperative Computing Group Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems Mississippi State University

Contact
Tomasz Haupt haupt@cavs.msstate.edu Anand Kalyanasundaram anand@cavs.msstate.edu