Porting your application to VIP with Boutiques

Overview:

Authors: Sorina Pop, Pascal Girard, Frédéric Cervenansky, Tristan Glatard

The Virtual Imaging Platform (VIP) is a web portal for medical simulation and image data analysis. It leverages resources available in the biomed Virtual Organisation of the European Grid Infrastructure to offer an open service to academic researchers worldwide. VIP counts, in May 2016, more than 900 registered users and a growing number of available applications. 

VIP allows to make applications executable on the web (as a service), and also to benefit from the EGI computing power. With VIP, researchers from all over the world can access multiple applications, as well as important amounts of computing resources and storage with no required technical skills beyond the use of a web browser.

Porting applications to data-analysis platforms such as VIP is a costly human effort. Boutiques is an application repository that allows automatic import and exchange of applications in data analysis platforms. It relies on Linux containers to solve the problem of application installation in a lightweight manner and it uses a versatile JSON format to describe command line tools.

The presentation will provide an overview of VIP and Boutiques, with a focus on the 2 steps allowing to port a new application to VIP: (i) describe the interface of the application using a JSON descriptor (http://boutiques.github.io) and (ii) bundle the application executable within a Docker container.

Target Audience:

End users, researchers who want to make their applications available as a service, service providers

Benefits for Audience:

The participants will have a good understanding of what VIP and Boutiques can provide. They will also learn what is needed in order to turn their application into a VIP service.

Topic 1: Challenges facing users and service providers