Note: see NOTES.md file for important release notes.

Full documentation is available online at http://spc.readthedocs.io

The Scientific Platform for the Cloud (SPC) is a Python-based cloud platform/framework for easily migrating and running scientific applications in the cloud. It is described in more detail in the following paper:

W Brewer, W Scott, and J Sanford, “An Integrated Cloud Platform for Rapid Interface Generation, Job Scheduling, Monitoring, Plotting, and Case Management of Scientific Applications”, Proc. of the International Conference on Cloud Computing Research and Innovation, Singapore, IEEE Press, October 2015, pp. 156-165, doi:10.1109/ICCCRI.2015.24 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7421906/

This platform is ideally suited to run scientific applications that: (1) require an input deck full of integers, floats, strings, and booleans stored in a standardized file format such as INI, XML, JSON, YAML, TOML, or Namelist.input, (2) require some amount of processing time (i.e. not instantaneous -- although it can handle such cases too), (3) require some plotting at the end of the simulation, (4) use MPI or MapReduce for parallelization (although handles serial cases well too). Moreover, it can handle other applications as well, but some amount of pre- or post-processing may be required. Such topics are described in more detail in the aforementioned paper. If you need a copy of this paper, please send an e-mail request to the address at the bottom of this file.

Disclaimer: SPC has been tested primarily with Google Chrome browser, Python 2.7.8 to 2.7.12, on Linux and OS X systems. Other environments may work, but are not guaranteed to work.

• Note, SPC assumes you have a few packages installed by default, namely: Python 2.78 or later, virtualenv, gcc, and python-dev (required for compiling psutil). If you don't have these installed, use either apt-get or yum to install them.

• To install dependencies, create and initialize the database which SPC uses, type:

  ./spc init

• To start running the web server, type:

  ./spc run

• Open browser to http://0.0.0.0:8580/

• To run the pre-installed example DNA Analyzer app in SPC:

  a. Activate App. Click Apps and then click installed. Activate the DNA app, then click Activated again

  b. Enter Parameters. Click on dna the default installed app. Enter a DNA string, or use the default. Then Click confirm to write the datafile to disk

  c. Start Job. Click execute to run the DNA analysis. SPC will submit it to the job scheduler, and will redirect to the output.

  d. Inspect Outputs. At this point, you can look at the files output by clicking the files button to show the file manager. The output button will show the redirected output of the executable. All the files for the case can be zipped up and downloaded by clicking the download button.

  e. View Plots. Click plot to see or define a list of plots. For each plot, you can view it by clicking the plot button. You can also see the data behind the plots by clicking the data button. These files are also available in the file manager by clicking files.

To install another SPC packaged app, e.g. Mendel's Accountant run the following commands according to the version needed:

• Mac OS X version:

  ./spc install https://github.com/whbrewer/fmendel-spc-osx/archive/master.zip

• Linux 64-bit version:

  ./spc install https://github.com/whbrewer/fmendel-spc-linux/archive/master.zip

• Linux 32-bit version:

  ./spc install https://github.com/whbrewer/fmendel-spc-linux-32/archive/master.zip

To update SPC: if you got the code using "git clone https://github.com/whbrewer/spc.git" you can just do "git pull" within the spc directory. If the database schema changes from the version you have, you may need to run "./spc migrate" to migrate the new changes to the database. However, DB schema changes do not occur often, and should be annotated in the commits.

For more information, see user's manual at http://spc.readthedocs.io

For more info, check out the documentation in the docs folder. Send questions to: [email protected]