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

[Cameron Hummels]

Congratulations, Matt!  This is really a great step toward the future of 
collaborative scientific coding.  Thank you for doing this!

Cameron

On 3/23/12 5:17 PM, Matthew Turk wrote:
> 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.  :)
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