=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1871/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=Fast Access to Remote Objects 2.0 - A renewed gateway to ENEAGRID
distributed computing resources
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1871/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-1871
|authors=Angelo Mariano,Giulio D’Amato,Fiorenzo Ambrosino,Giuseppe Aprea,Antonio Colavincenzo,Marco Fina,Agostino Funel,Guido Guarnieri,Filippo Palombi,Samuele Pierattini,Giovanni Ponti,Giuseppe Santomauro,Giovanni Bracco,Silvio Migliori
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iwsg/MarianoDAACFFGP16
}}
==Fast Access to Remote Objects 2.0 - A renewed gateway to ENEAGRID
distributed computing resources==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1871/paper9.pdf
8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016), 8-10 June 2016
Fast Access to Remote Objects 2.0
A renewed gateway to ENEAGRID
distributed computing resources
Angelo Mariano∗ , Giulio D’Amato† , Fiorenzo Ambrosino‡ , Giuseppe Aprea§ ,
Antonio Colavincenzo‡ , Marco Fina† , Agostino Funel‡ , Guido Guarnieri‡ ,
Filippo Palombi§ , Samuele Pierattini¶ , Giovanni Ponti‡ , Giuseppe Santomaurok ,
Giovanni Bracco§ and Silvio Migliori§
Energy Technologies Department, ICT Division
ENEA † Sysman Progetti & Servizi srl k Consortium GARR
∗ Bari, ‡ Portici (NA), § Rome, ¶ Florence, Italy Rome, Italy Rome, Italy
∗ Email: angelo.mariano@enea.it
Abstract—This paper introduces a renewed gateway to maintenability and customizability, through the usage of well-
ENEAGRID distributed computing resources, named Fast Access known technologies. ENEA, the Italian National Agency for
to Remote Objects 2.0 (FARO 2.0). FARO 2.0 is a tool for ap- New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic De-
plication and desktop virtualization with a strong focus towards
user experience (UX), providing trained as well as untrained velopment is offering a completely renewed gateway for its
users a collection of centralized services that can be seamlessly High Performance Computing (HPC) services, called FARO
used on their client through a remote desktop protocol. FARO 2.0 (Fast Access to Remote Objects) to let internal as well as
2.0 is a JavaFX application whose graphical user interface (GUI) external scientists take advantage of its remote services based
and whose main logics has been implemented through the well- on ENEAGRID distributed computing resources and CRESCO
known Web technologies (HTML5, CSS3, Javascript) for a easier
maintainability and customizability, taking full advantage of the linux clusters [1].
WebView component. Its framework has been deployed both
as general purpose GUI for remote user access to ENEAGRID II. M AIN PICTURE
resources and as specialized application or workflow oriented Developed in the contest of the Italian PON “Smart
GUI. They are applied in a set of applicative domains, ranging Cities and Communities” R&C 2007-2013 with the project
from material science to technologies for energy and industry,
environmental modeling and nuclear fusion. Some examples and “EDOC@Work 3.0 - Education and work in the cloud” [2]
results are also presented. in collaboration with Sysman Progetti & Servizi S.r.l. [3],
Keywords—graphical user interface; remote desktop; dis- FARO 2.0 is a tool for scientists and students to perform
tributed computing; virtual labs research as well as train in a real-world HPC environment.
FARO 2.0 has been implemented as a drop-in replacement for
I. I NTRODUCTION its predecessor, FARO [4], it thus relies on its same network
The need for a centralized access to computing resources infrastructure, depicted in Fig.1, and remote desktop protocol.
has resulted in an extensive research towards software tools, The main goal of FARO 2.0 is to provide users a software
such as scientific gateways, to allow an intuitive and easy- solution with a strong focus towards UX, maintainability
to-use fruition of remote services (e.g. application and desk- and customizability, being a pleasant interface for real-time
top virtualization, storage, data . . . ). Distributed computing application and desktop virtualization (with remote graphics
infrastructures (such as grids, clouds), as well as general- acceleration) on conventional as well as on “special” hardware
purpose yet highly specialized cloud facilities, are now em- platforms (featuring Intel MICs or high performance GPUs).
powering scientists in a growing number of tasks from their The remote desktop protocol used to deliver applications
everyday work life. Furthermore, they are even becoming a and desktops to end-users is based on NX over an SSH.
key foundation technology even for untrained users in many The compression and transport protocol of NX is used to
areas beyond scientific research, such as in education. For this enhance the native X display protocol performances in such a
reason, modern scientific gateways should be developed with way that services are usable even with slower links. The NX
a strong focus towards user experience (UX), through a high procotol has been released by Nomachine [5], but many open
degree of interactivity in a pleasing graphical user interface source server and client implementations exists [6], [7]. FARO
(GUI), just like any mainstream application for smartphone 2.0 remote desktop server is based on a customized version
and tablets (an “app”) that users already understand and of FreeNX, where we implemented some advanced features
appreciate. Moreover, they should foresee a high degree of (e.g. load balancing and session distribution over a cluster).
8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016), 8-10 June 2016
Fig. 3. NX client asking for ENEAGRID credentials based on Kerberos 5
authentication protocol.
mented through well-known Web technologies (HTML5,
CSS3, Javascript) for an easier maintainability and customiz-
Fig. 1. Network infrastructure: many client devices connect to NX frontend ability, taking full advantage of the WebView component.
through a NX over SSH protocol and then the frontend redirects and load The application is delivered to the end-user (as soon as
balances requests over a set of graphic backends that displays the FARO 2.0
interface. his NX session is authenticated) by a load balanced graphic
backend in a CRESCO cluster: this means that FARO 2.0 is
executed on ENEAGRID and is served through an entirely
managed ecosystem, where a team of administrators takes care
of the runtime environment in order to ensure its consistent
behavior. Consider that all software packages and components,
including the Java runtime environment required by JavaFX,
are provided and deployed on a distributed filesystem that
connects all computing resources in ENEAGRID. Thus, the
only component that users have to install on their machines is
the NX client, whereas any other tool and service is remotely
executed and rendered on the local screen with near native
performances through the NX protocol. This tool and service
distribution model ensures better security for data and simpler
deployment of complex scientific softwares and their updates,
since everything runs on machines that are monitored and
serviced by our administrators.
The core of FARO 2.0 is its desktop application (a container,
in this context) developed in JavaFX, showing a WebView.
Fig. 2. Web page showing download option for pre-configured NX client.
Instead, its GUI and its main logics have been developed in
HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript as a single page application
Accreditated users can connect to FARO 2.0 by downloading (SPA), replicating the trending paradigm of cross-platform
a pre-configured NX client (as well as a session file) from its hybrid apps. The container is a lightweight piece of software
web portal (see Fig.2). that implements an ordinary browser, rendering a local web
It seems important to remark that application and desktop page. However, the container also injects a custom Java class
virtualization is one among the many tools and services that (a bridge) in the Javascript global namespace. Thus, through
ENEAGRID offers to its users and administrators, such as web Javascript calls, the above web page is able to execute any
portals for batch job submission and monitoring (JobRama), member function that has been made available from the
cloud storage (AFSBox), distributed file system monitoring container. In this implementation, the bridge exports methods
(AMACA) and help-desk (GridTicket). The Authentication to launch new processes based on CLI commands and im-
and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) of ENEAGRID is plements the application logic needed to callback registered
based on Kerberos 5 [8]; it is integrated with AFS distributed Javascript member functions in case of a new message in the
filesystem and its Access Control List (ACL) system [9] and standard-out or in the standard-error streams; this allows to
is used for all the services provided by the infrastructure (see virtually execute any command on the host backend server that
Fig.3). is executing FARO 2.0. Moreover, every command executed
is tracked in a user home log that allows administrators to
III. FARO 2.0 troubleshoot every problem may occur in the execution of
FARO 2.0 is a JavaFX application whose graphical user remote code. A convenient call from the Javascript runtime
interface (GUI) and whose main logic has been imple- environment is, for example, able to let the user remotely
2
8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016), 8-10 June 2016
Fig. 4. Main FARO 2.0 interface, showing xTerm launchers for clusters Fig. 6. Main FARO 2.0 interface, showing software available in the
available in the ENEAGRID environment ENEAGRID environment
new virtual research environments (e.g. gateways for highly
specialized use cases, collecting scientific tools targeting a
well-defined research context), such as what we call the
“ENEA Virtual labs” (as an example see [14]). This science
gateway plays an important role also on computational chem-
istry applications based on software like Quantum Espresso
and cp2k, remotely managed by ENEAGRID CMAST Virtual
Lab [15]. From a security standpoint, it seems important to
remark that any CLI command executed by FARO 2.0 is
authenticated as if the user wrote the command on a shell, and
there is no way to execute a malicious command with more
privileges (e.g. privilege escalation) from FARO 2.0 code.
Moreover, the WebView scope is constrained to local pages
in order to avoid cross-site scripting.
Fig. 5. Main FARO 2.0 interface, showing some virtual labs available in the
ENEAGRID environment
Through the usage of web standards, FARO 2.0 implements
a full-featured gateway for application and desktop virtual-
ization in the ENEAGRID distributed computing environment
open and interact with the command prompt of a standard that can also be used as a boilerplate for new applications,
or an advanced node in a cluster, or launch any kind of such as the “ENEA Virtual Labs”.
scientific software in a dedicated environment (e.g. MATLAB,
COMSOL, IDL). More precisely, each launch initiated from IV. C OMPARISON WITH OTHER TOOLS
FARO 2.0 is redirected through the SSH protocol to the ENEA FARO 2.0 offers many similarities with a commercial tool
instance of IBM Load Sharing Facility (LSF), the scheduler named RemoteApp from Microsoft Corp [11]. RemoteApp is a
that enqueues requests both for interactive and batch jobs [10]. software tool based on the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol
As a matter of fact, any interaction with the ENEAGRID implementing a launcher for applications hosted on Microsoft
environment can be routed through FARO 2.0. The main Azure. It must be installed on the user device and is available
interface is shown in Fig.4-5-6. for Windows, iOS, Mac OS X and Android. This solution is
FARO 2.0 is easy to maintain and customize, since most not as flexible as FARO 2.0 because it requires a set of specific
of its code reside outside the container package and merely OS and resources in order to deliver a service remotely.
implements a SPA (with bindings to some Java member func- Another platform that we considered is Citrix Workspace
tions): this allows to reconfigure quite the entire application Cloud, that is built around Citrix proprietary protocol [12]. It
without the need for a compile process. Moreover, the SPA offers a complete solution to every remote workspace request.
can run (with a limited functionality) within a web browser; it This protocol was used in the past by ENEA [13] but was
can thus be previewed in a very agile way. We are even able abandoned due to commercial costs and more stringent tech-
to provide deeply customized interfaces by creating branches nical requirements. Instead, FARO 2.0 is distributed toward
of the SPA, without the need to modify the container. There is users as a remote application itself, and for this reason it works
definitely no need to know how FARO 2.0 actually manages on any platform where an NX client is available. Besides this,
the launch of remote tools and services in order to create consider that the JavaFX desktop application at the core of
3
8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016), 8-10 June 2016
FARO 2.0 is in some way independent from remote desktop
protocol, as it can be deployed through every protocol one
can choose to render a remote desktop. The NX technology
has been GPL-licensed until the 3.5 version and until now
it offers a set of open source and free tools that can ensure
a lot of flexibility for our solution. Its protocol is optimized
for low bandwidth connections and its performances attracted
interests even from Google [16]. We successfully employed
this technology in ENEAGRID even for heavy tasks like
remote 3D rendering [17].
V. A PPLICATIONS
In the following we will show some interesting applications
and customization of FARO 2.0.
The first application is related to the ADP Virtual Lab [18]. Fig. 7. Customized FARO 2.0 interface for the ADP project
The aim is to provide a launcher for a code for the analysis
of small-powered wood biomass energy systems (so called
COGEGNO). The code has been implemented in Matlab and
Scilab environments, and transferred on a web platform, in a
“virtual laboratory” powered by the computational systems of
ENEAGRID. Among the main components of the model there
are the gas recirculation and air staging mobile-grid burner
and the thermic gain obtained from the pre-heating of the air
in input to the boiler. For the model of the boiler the code
uses an helicoidal flow one, with particular attention to the
molten salts, for the advantages arising from the possibility
offered by these fluids to work in a broader temperature
range and at higher temperatures, increasing the gain of
the plant. If the power and the electrical efficiency of the
cogeneration system are known, the code is able to calculate
the performance and the sizes of the main components of
the heat generator not only in nominal conditions but also Fig. 8. Customized FARO 2.0 interface for the ADP project: dynamically
if the operational conditions vary. The code is installed on changing interface (A)
the AFS filesystem. In particular Scilab code was compiled
and only the executable files are stored in AFS. Using the
FARO 2.0 interface, users can pass the values of the parameters
to the code and choose the operational conditions between
dynamically loaded options. These parameters are passed to
CLI commands through an easy-to-understand JSON format,
that the backend computational core is able to interpret and
then execute. A sample illustration of the customized interface
is in Fig.7-8-9. Consider that the entire architecture design
of FARO 2.0 has strict security policies based on AFS ACLs
and allow software developers to deploy their products hiding
the implementation; in this way any user can execute scientific
codes without accessing directly to them.
A second application of FARO 2.0 is developed for the Web
Crawling Virtual Lab [19]. The aim of this tool integrated
in the related ENEA project is to create a simple interface
Fig. 9. Customized FARO 2.0 interface for the ADP project: dynamically
beetwen the users and the Web crawling environment installed changing interface (B)
on ENEAGRID. The Web crawling is an activity that auto-
matically and systematically explores the Web, in order to
search for contents/documents to download. Starting from the five tabs, in each of them, one can perform some operations.
main html page of the interface, an user can create a web In the first tab, there is a form where one can insert some
crawling session, launch the session and monitor the generated general informations (such as the title and comments) about
internet traffic. More specifically, this interface is composed of the session that wants to create. In the second tab, a user
4
8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016), 8-10 June 2016
Fig. 10. Customized FARO 2.0 interface: welcome screen for web crawling
project Fig. 11. Customized FARO 2.0 interface: configuration panel for web
crawling project
can fill in a module with the configuration options to pass
to resource scheduler in order to submit a session job. These
options are split between the run configurations and software
parameters. As run configuration an user can set the running
time of job, the number of nodes to use and the number of
agents per node. An agent is a Java process that plays the
role of a crawler (i.e. a software that explores and downloads
the web pages). As software parameters it is possible to can
set many options for each crawler (e.g., the URLs seed to
initially consider, the number of threads and the size of cache
memories). If the user does not decide to set these options,
automatically the interface creates a session configuration file
with default options. In the third tab, an user can submit a
batch job for the current session. In the fourth tab, once a web
crawling session is submitted, the user can monitoring in real
time the downloaded data amount by every agent. Finally, the
fifth tab allows to view some statistics at the end of the latest
executed session. The tool has been recently equipped with
a further feature called “snapshot”, which allows to schedule Fig. 12. Experimental FARO 2.0 setup on a Cendio ThinLinc protocol: login
form integrated with ENEAGRID Kerberos 5 domain
periodic web crawling sessions. This is particularly useful to
create a set of snapshots for some portions of the web, in order
to analyze the changes and the evolution over a time period.
Periodic scheduled web crawling session parameters can be top protocol over as many client configurations as possible.
set in the proper section in the tool interface. Customized The emerging WebRTC APIs implemented in modern web
interfaces are shown in Fig.10-11 browsers [20], open up the new opportunity for a cross-
For both applications, in the submission step, ad hoc shell platform web-based remote desktop experience, that could
scripts are used. These scripts read the parameters defined on even avoid the need to perform the client software download
the mask and usually encoded in a JSON format and launch the to start using FARO 2.0. In the meanwhile our research is
codes on execution nodes following the rules defined by the targeted towards remote desktop protocols that can enhance
LSF scheduler. The applications provide also an Help page the features of FARO 2.0. An experimental setup has been
with an useful set of links for users (to submit tickets to realized with Cendio ThinLinc [21], that is based on SSH
ENEAGRID administrators and/or to monitor job execution). and VNC (see Figs.12-13-14), and we are planning also tests
Every customized FARO 2.0 application is a workflow- with other clientless remote desktop gateway, like for example
oriented GUI enabling interaction with ENEAGRID compu- Guacamole [22] or with remote viewer open source software
tational resources and easily interoperates with every set of like Spice [23].
scientific tools installed on our grid/cloud environment.
As it was stressed before, the main interface is independent
VI. F UTURE DEVELOPMENTS from remote desktop protocol, so it can be reproduced over
The most challenging part of the above architecture is different connection types between desktop clients and the
ensuring our users a consistent behavior of the remote desk- ENEAGRID computing environment.
5
8th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG 2016), 8-10 June 2016
for a compile process. FARO 2.0 uses an open source imple-
mentation of NX as its remote desktop procotol, and an NX
client is the only software component that users have to install
to start using it. The future usage of WebRTC based clients
may lead to an even leaner remote desktop experience. We
believe that application and desktop virtualization constitute an
excellent tool and service distribution model, that lets scientists
focus more on research since relying on a high performance
environment that is completely managed by our administrators.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Alessio Rocchi who
was the former developer of FARO application and all
the people involved in the management and operation of
ENEAGRID/CRESCO infrastructure [24]. We also thank Mat-
teo Caldera who is in charge of the computational core of
the ADP Virtual Lab. FARO 2.0 has been developed in the
contest of the Italian PON “Smart Cities and Communities”
R&C 2007-2013 with the project “EDOC@Work 3.0 - Edu-
cation and work in the cloud”. Part of this activity has been
Fig. 13. Experimental FARO 2.0 setup on a Cendio ThinLinc protocol:
supported by the ENEA-Forschungszentrum JULICH GmbH
welcome screen after logon through a browser contract “Fornitura da parte ENEA di attività di modellistica
molecolare”.
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