iPlant Goals & Objectives
What is the community?
- resource providers (where resources are domain resources & tools)
- ease of user management (SSO, ease of enrollment/registration)
- ease of group management (inherit across providers; must align with user mgmt)
- data access across providers (iRODS)
- manage /quota/access at various levels (meter and throttle)
- resource and services "federation" (sharability of workflow between services)
- integration of 3rd party tools
- end-users / consumers (domain scientists)
- SSO, linked to home institution
- ability to form ad-hoc groups
- ability to control access with keys/tokens that can be honored across services and providers, and yet limited based on time or something
- can use web/API and command line apps w/ VO-based credentials (command-line apps where different libraries can be pulled in, can do more than just ssh)
- keep data in one location, integration with many analysis platforms
- activity dashboard, messaging and alerts, consolidated from providers
- misc notes
- using google for calendar, document creation (wiki for final doc, but for the actual drafting, they go to google); use doodle for meeting scheduling
- iPlant does not have grouper installed
- developers
- user mgmt out of the box
- access to federated resources
- ability to meter and throttle (because developers easily create DOS situations; need handles in place so they know who is doing what)
- unified sharing, reporting, dashboards
- ease of integration to resources that need significant permissions (i.e. running compute data intensive tasks)
- become part of a "market place" model
- misc notes
- privacy of data is not a huge concern at this point from a contractual point of view, tho' individual researchers may be anxious about research not being exposed until the publication happens
- internalization of VO may start to impact the importance of the privacy/restriction of data; possible assertion that if the data is under contractual restrictions, then maybe it is not a fit for iPlant
- educators (classroom, workshops)
- make all iPlant resources easy to use in class settings
- easy to work with ad-hoc user groups (workshops, tutorial with ease of provisioning/deprovisioning) especially for institutions with poor IdM
- integration with LMS
- integration with dashboard for management of self-paced tutorials/learning material
Outputs of iPlant
- toolkit for providers integrating with iPlant (iPlant does the heavy lifting with InCommon and others)
- toolkits for developers (domestication info; different toolkits for different needs and varying levels of sophistication)
- SSO features/capabilities for end consumers
- best practices for community (most resource providers have no idea about federation, domestication, VO IdM)
- a few domesticated apps
- infrastructure that promotes better collaboration
- environments can be provided to researchers to give them a place to build their tools (they are designing the instructions and components for doing this; it will be platform independent)
Key applications needing domestication
- iRODS
- VNC
- others?
- iPlant current offerings
- misc notes
- is there a flow diagram of all the ways researchers can access iPlant services? No, but this may be something the Bedrock grant-funded person may be assigned as an "intro" project; this basically will help understand scope
- by end of meeting, that grant-funded position will be better scoped and hiring process can start
- some time estimates for some of the work and priorities for iPlant would also be helpful, so we can determine where we need to wait to see how a space
—