The goal of this talk is to highlight open source opportunities for students especially through an opportunity to earn $5000 through Google Summer of Code program. I will discuss some of the tips on how to engage with open source communities, the befits for contributing. I will provide motivating examples on how students can gain significant experience in contributing challenging distributed systems problems while impacting scientific research. I will specifically focus with a concrete example of Apache Airavata software suite for Web-based science gateways. I will list some example GSoC topics of interest and provide some recipes for success in getting accepted and navigating through success.

1. Science Gateways, Open Source
& Google Summer of Code
Suresh Marru
Apache Software Foundation
Indiana University

2. Acknowledgements
Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Extreme Science and Engineering
Discovery Environments (XSEDE)
Science Gateways Group, Pervasive
Technology Institute, Indiana
University (SGG)

3. Credits to ….
Science Gateways Group @ IU
 Marlon Pierce: Group Lead
 Amila Jayasekara
 Chathuri Wimalasena
 Heshan Suriyaachchi
 Jun Wang
 Lahiru Gunathilake
 Raminder Singh
 Saminda Wijeratne
 Suresh Marru
 Viknes Balasubramanee
 Yu (Marie) Ma

4. What will you hear today?
Science Gateways
Web 2.0, Social Networking, Grid & Cloud
Computing, BigData, everything-as-a-service -
- churned into real-world scientific research.
Open Source
Hack into Open Source projects – a good way to
cherish doing what you like as opposite to
what you have to.
Google Summer of Code
Reward yourself with $5000 while making a case
for Future Employments & Graduate School
Admissions
Apache Airavata

5. Outline
What are Science Gateways?
Getting your way in Open Source
Apache Software Foundation
Google Summer of Code
Interested? Next Steps……

6. www.google-melange.org
www.google-melange.com

7. What is Google Summer of Code?
Google Summer of Code is a program designed to
encourage college student participation in
open source software development.

8. Key Goals of GSOC
• Inspire young developers to begin participating in
open source development
• Provide students in computer science and related fields
the opportunity to do work related to their academic
pursuits during the summer
• Give students more exposure to real-world software
development scenarios (e.g. distributed development,
software licensing questions, mailing list etiquette, etc.)
• Get more open source code created and released for
the benefit of all
• Help open source projects identify and bring in new
developers and committers

9. GSoC in numbers: Countries

10. GSoC Top Schools

11. GSoC in numbers: Students
Number of
students max’ed
and stabilized
around 1200.
This is not
expected to grow
in near future,
understandable,
still thank you
Google!!

12. GSoC Win-Win Perspective
• Project Perspective:
o Paid software developer for the summer.
o Attracting a new member into the project
community.
• Student Perspective
o Opportunity to gain (open source) software
development experience.
o Good payment for rewarding work.
o Ability to network and become known within a
structured, distributed setting.

13. What to look for in a project?
 Can you engage with project (not just
the mentor)?. Can they guide you with
tutorials and hand hold early on?
 For instance, will you get to experience
“Apache Way”?
 Is the project welcoming and
appreciative?
 Is there a mileage for your extra effort
with long term commitments?

14. Apache Software Foundation
Indiana University

15. Core Contributions beyond GSOC
 Milinda realized he could execute his
GSOC project, but had great thoughts on
how we can fundamentally improve
Airavata Architecture to make it easy for
future extensions.
 Developer community agreed to the new
Architecture.
 Simple
 Easy extendibility.
 Airavata has adopted his proposed new
architecture

16. Enhanced Airavata Architecture
Global InHandlers
Job Execution Context
Provider Logic
Provider specific InHandlers
Application specific In Handlers
Application specific OutHandlers
Global OutHandlers Provider specific OutHandlers

17. Pick what motivates you
 Harness your skills and interests
 If possible pick a project relevant and “required”
by aligning with your’ academic curriculum
 As a final year (research) project
 As a Masters-level research project
 Create an interesting and challenging research
problem
 Sense of satisfaction and achievements
 Research publications
 Presentations at ApacheCon and similar conferences
 Committership

18. What does a good mentor look for?
Free & Paid Contributions – the reality
Long term participant in the project (not a
software developer for ~3 months)
Accomplish meaningful research-oriented
goals either within the project or cross-
cutting projects.
Teach open source/community
participation to the next generation
workforce

19. What will you hear today?
Science Gateways
Web 2.0, Social Networking, Grid & Cloud
Computing, BigData, everything-as-a-service -
- churned into real-world scientific research.


Apache Airavata

20. What Is Cyberinfrastructure?
“Cyberinfrastructure consists of computing systems,
data storage systems, advanced instruments and
data repositories, visualization environments, and
people, all linked together by software and high
performance networks to improve research
productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise
possible.”
–Craig Stewart, Indiana University

21. Apache Software Foundation
Indiana University

22. Dynamic Adaptive Cyberinfrastructure -
Reacting to real-time weather
Storms Forming
Forecast Model
Streaming
Observations Data Mining
Instrument Steering
Refine forecast
Envisioned by a multi-disciplinary
team from
OU, IU, NCSA, Unidata, UAH, Howard, On-Demand
Millersville, Colorado State, RENCI Grid Computing

23. Anatomy of a Science Gateway
 Gateway User Interface
 Web Portals
 Desktop Clients
 Social/ Collaboration Capabilities
 Security Infrastructure
 Analyses & Visualization Capabilities
 Workflow Execution Framework
 Application Abstraction
 Workflow construction & Enactment
 Compute Resource Management
 Scheduling
 Messaging System
 Data Management
 Provenance Collection

24. Apache Software Foundation
Indiana University

25. 25

26. XSEDE Vision
The eXtreme Science and
Engineering Discovery
Environment (XSEDE):
enhances the productivity of scientists
and engineers by providing them with
new and innovative capabilities
and thus
facilitates scientific discovery while
enabling transformational
science/engineering and innovative
educational programs

27. https://www.xsede.org/gateways-
overview

28. Today, there are approximately 35
gateways using XSEDE

29. What will you hear today?

Open Source
Hack into Open Source projects – a good way to
cherish doing what you like as opposite to
what you have to.

Apache Airavata

30. The Apache Software Foundation
 Apache software powers  Governance and Staffing
65% of web sites worldwide  Board of Directors
Project Management
 501(c)3 non-profit

Committees
foundation  ASF Members
 Reasons for creating ASF  Committers
 Create legal entity  Contributors
 Protect contributors from  Funding
liability
 All-volunteer
 Protect Apache assets staffing/development
 Membership: individual resources
 Apache Incubator  Donations
 Corporate investment

31. Apache Way:
Beyond Open Source, Open Community
 Transparency
 Decision-making and actions are observable
 Events of interest are published and recorded
 Transparency invites collaboration
 Meritocratic Governance
 Influence on decisions is based on merit
 Merit is earned in public
 Community based governance
 Community
 Common interest, Community interest, Common
experience
 “Community before code”
 Collaboration
 Systems supporting communication and coordination:
repositories, trackers, forums, build tools
 You can reuse what you can see and influence
 More eyeballs means better quality

32. Apache Organization
• Apache is a meritocratic organization
– Merit does not expire. You earn your keep and your credentials
• Start out as Contributor
– Patches, mailing list comments, testing, documentation, etc.
– No commit access
• Move onto Committer
– Commit access, evolve the code
• PMC Members
– Have binding VOTEs on releases/personnel
• Officer (VP, Project)
– PMC Chair
• ASF Member
– Have binding VOTE in the state of the foundation
– Elect Board of Directors
• Director
– Oversight of projects, foundation activities

33. Our experience with Apache ..
 Give up control and get back contributions.
 Being in apache by itself doesn’t guarantee sustainability but open
doors for sustainability.
 Google Summer of code has bought in students, increased
documentation, identified confined projects.
 Do not have to worry about getting sued by Oracle for using Java
API’s. Standing behind a shield of expert lawyers.
 Companies make in-kind contributions, some have concrete plans,
some or just evangelizing. Both are good.
 Todays, Cyberinfrastructure eco-system is not in a funding
situation to work on parallel independent implementation.
 Shared implementation is hard to achieve, but well thought
architectures can achieve it.
 Also encourage multiple implementations and let the communities
sort out. The winner sustains. Example: Apache Axis2, Apache
CXF

34. Apache Contributions Aren’t Just
Software
• Apache committers and PMC members
aren’t just code writers.
• Successful communities also include
– Important users
– Project evangelists
– Content providers: documentation, tutorials
– Testers, requirements providers, and
constructive complainers
• Using Jira and mailing lists
– Anything else that needs doing.

35. Apache Airavata
http://airavata.apache.org

36. Science Gateways with Airavata

37. Apache Software Foundation
Indiana University

38. Apache Software Foundation
Indiana University

39. Key Airavata Features
 Graphical user interface to construct, execute, control,
manage and reuse scientific workflows.
 Desktop tools and browser-based web interface
components to manage applications, workflows and
generated data.
 Sophisticated server-side tools to register, schedule and
manage scientific applications on high performance
computational resources.
 Ability to Interface and interoperate with various external
(third party) data, workflow and provenance
management tools.

40. A Classic Scientific Workflow
 Workflows are composite applications built out of
independent parts.
 Parts are executables wrapped as network accessible services
 The classic example is that codes A, B, and C need to
be executed in a specific sequence.
 A, B, C: parallel codes compiled and executable on a cluster,
supercomputer, etc. by schedulers.
 A, B, and C do not need to be co-located
 A, B, and C may be sequential or parallel
 A, B and C may have date or control dependencies
 Data may need to be staged in and out
 Some variations on ABC:
 Conditional execution branches
 Dynamic execution resource binding
 Iterations (Do-while, For-Each) over all or parts of the sequence
 Triggers, events, data streams

41. Challenges in Scientific Workflows
Accommodating wide range of
execution patterns
 Iterations: for-each, do-while, dot and
Cartesian products
 Interactivity, adaptivity, non-determinism
Accommodating error and
uncertainties

42. NextGen Workflow Systems:
Need for Interactivity Across Layers
 Scientific workflow systems and compiled
workflow languages have focused on
modeling, scheduling, data movement,
dynamic service creation and monitoring of
workflows.
 Building on these foundations Airavata
extends to a interactive and flexible workflow
systems.
 Airavata Workflow Features include:
 interactive ways of interfering and steering the
workflow execution
 interpreted workflow execution model
 high level instruction set
 flexibility to execute individual workflow activity and
wait for further analysis.

43. Interactivity Contd.
 Derivations during workflow Execution
that does not affect the structure of the
workflow
 dynamic change workflow inputs, workflow rerun.
interpreted workflow execution model.
 dynamic change in point of execution, workflow
smart rerun.
 Fault handling and exception models.
 Derivation that change the workflow
DAG during runtime
 Reconfiguration of activity..
 dynamic addition of activities to the workflow.
 Dynamic remove or replace of activity to the
workflow

44. Interactivity
 Mathematical uncertainty:
 PDE’s from domain problems do not have analytical solution and thereby look
at numerical methods to find solutions
 These solvers may not converge depending on method, PDE system, initial
conditions and expected output tolerances
 statistical techniques lead to nondeterministic results.
 closer observation at computational output ensure acceptability of results.
 Domain uncertainty:
 Scenarios of running against range of parameter values in an attempt to find
the most appropriate input set.
 Initial execution providing estimate of the accuracy of the inputs and
facilitating further refinement.
 Outputs are diverse and nondeterministic
 Resource uncertainty:
 Failures in distributed systems are norm than an exception
 transient failures can be retried if computation is side-effect free/Idempotent.
 persistent failures require migration
 Real-time Model refinement
 Real-time event processing systems not having data available prior to
initialization of model.
 models evolve over time and can take advantage of more and more events
as they become available

45. Illustrating Interactivity
Asynchronous Applica on
refinements Steering
Orchestra on level Interac ons Job Level Interac ons
Parametric Provenance Workflow Job launch, Checkpoint/
Sweeps Steering gliding Restart
Model
Mathema cal Domain Resource
Refinement
Uncertain es

46. Apache Airavata in Action
Domain Description
Astronomy Image processing pipeline for One Degree
Imager instrument on XSEDE
Astrophysics Supporting workflow of Dark Energy Survey
simulations working group on XSEDE
Bioinformatics Supported workflow executions on Amazon
EC2 for BioVLAB project
Biophysics Manage large scale data analysis of analytical
ultracentrifugation experiments on XSEDE and
campus resources
Computational Manage workflows to support computational
Chemistry chemistry parameter studies for
ParamChem.org on XSEDE
Nuclear Physics Workflows for nuclear structure calculations
using Leadership Class Configuration
Interaction (LCCI) computations on DOE
resources

47. What will you hear today?


Google Summer of Code
Reward yourself with $5000 while making a case
for Future Employments & Graduate School
Admissions
Apache Airavata

48. How to crack GSoC?
1 2 3 4
• Engage Early
• Familiarize Projects
• Propose Ideas
•Win, Code, Earn…
Cherish !!!
Apache Airavata

49. Be Part of the project
Community
• Play with different popular open source software ..
• Experiment with the emerging technologies …
• Learn & Engage with a multidisciplinary community..

50. Be pro-active instead of being
reactive:
come up with your own ideas

51. GSoC Win-Win Perspective
• Project Perspective:
o Paid software developer for the summer.
o Attracting a new member into the project
community.
• Student Perspective
o Opportunity to gain (open source) software
development experience.
o Good payment for rewarding work.
o Ability to network and become known within a
structured, distributed setting.

52. What to look for in a project?
 Engage with project (not just the
mentor). Can they guide you with
tutorials and hand hold early on?
 For instance, will you get to experience
“Apache Way”?
 Is the project welcoming and
appreciative?
 Is there a mileage for your extra effort
with long term commitments?

53. Pick what motivates you
 Harness your skills and interests
 If possible pick a project relevant and “required”
by aligning with your’ academic curriculum
 As a final year (research) project
 As a Masters-level research project
 Create an interesting and challenging research
problem
 Sense of satisfaction and achievements
 Research publications
 Presentations at ApacheCon and similar conferences
 Committership

54. What does a good mentor look for?
Free & Paid Contributions – the reality
Long term participant in the project (not a
software developer for ~3 months)
Accomplish meaningful research-oriented
goals either within the project or cross-
cutting projects.
Teach open source/community
participation to the next generation
workforce

55. Join the mailing list
 Google Group - sgw-gsoc-discuss:
 https://groups.google.com/d/forum/sgw-gsoc-
discuss
Need more info – smarru@apache.org
Apache Airavata