[yt-dev] (Fun!) Call for testing: Alpha version of the yt data hub

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

This cycle I applied to Amazon Research, and last week I received
notice that the grant was accepted (woo hoo!)  Using the AWS credits,
I've been able to deploy an alpha version of a "data hub" on Amazon
EC2.  It's nearly fully backed by S3, SimpleDB and EC2 (only user
authentication is stored on the instance, which I'd like to change
eventually.)

The idea behind this is to make an easy way to share *data*, not just
images, scripts, and so on.  It's not designed to be robust for many
years (like a proper archiving solution would be) and it's not
designed to be fully generic, but rather it's designed ... as a
pastebin for data.  You construct a widget, a representation of a data
object, and then you can shove it up there and display the data
through the widget.

Right now it contains widgets for:

 * 3D Vertices, displayed with WebGL
 * Variable mesh maps (i.e., the mapserver)
 * Image collections
 * Parameter files

There are a number of places where it's not yet finished: the vertices
and image collections haven't been wrapped into yt proper but as it
stands, yt can upload both parameter files and variable mesh (slices,
projections) really easily.

The Data Hub has been deployed here:

https://data.yt-project.org/

and some example scripts are here:

https://bitbucket.org/MatthewTurk/yt.hub_examples/

You might get errors about the certificate, which is self-signed, or
about loading non-secure content (the XTK source for the 3D models),
and you'll *probably* be able to crash the view or get a "Server
incorrectly configured" error.  It's still pretty early!  But I'd like
to request that you try hammering on this, try uploading data, and I
would really appreciate any help with design, coding, new widgets,
etc.  The source is at http://bitbucket.org/MatthewTurk/yt.hub/ .  As
you'll find, it's still a bit hacked together, but I am interested in
continuing to refine it, make it look better and nicer, and to ensure
that it's maintainable.  (If you are interested in this, fork away!)

Any feedback would be *greatly* appreciated.  I'm pretty excited about
using this for collaboration and data sharing!  Down the road I could
see adding on more functionality like synchronized views, annotations
(halos, points of interest, etc), 3D volumes (for phase plots) and on
and on and on.  In fact, this could be a way to share results with
collaborators from a running simulation.

Better than feedback, though, would be if you tried it out -- and
uploaded some data!

-Matt

PS The variable mesh maps should work on phones and tablets.  :)