4) Experiment Portal Workflow

Interaction Through Portal

All interactions of a remote User with AERPAW start on AERPAW's Web Portal.

As the diagram above reminds (see also Section 1.2), AERPAW's main operational model is a user-programmed but batch-executed one. For all AERPAW Experiments, the Experimenter needs to undertake the following actions on the web Portal:

Register as an AERPAW User (one-time)
Request and receive approval for Experimenter and/or PI Role (one-time)
Create Project (for PIs only), and/or Experiment
Optionally, add other Users to Project (for PIs and delegated Experimenters only) or Experiment
Trigger or request Experiment execution sessions start/stop, check status

For some types of Experiments, the Experimenter prepares the Experiment themselves, using AERPAW's Virtual Environment (Digital Twin), using standard remote access tools such as ssh and OVPN. In such cases, the Portal also allows the User to:

Create or upload credentials for secure access
Download profile files to enable secure access

The rest of this section presents an overview of these Portal interactions an AERPAW User will go through, followed by detailed walkthroughs of some of these interactions. It also presents overview and walkthrough of the procedures to access the Experiment execution sessions (using tools such as ssh and OVPN).

Details of working at the source code level to instantiate individual Experiment functionality are dealt with in Section 5.

"Users" and "Experimenters"

In general, we use the terms “User” and “Experimenter” interchangeably. The slightly different connotations of the two terms are as follows: the “User” refers to the login ID and its Role, payment attributes, etc., while the “Experimenter” is more abstract, and represents the intent behind a certain experiment. For example, if two different Users of the same Group (see below) log in at different times to perform continued development of the same experiment, they are acting as the same Experimenter when they do so. When the experiment is executing in the Testbed, typically no User is logged into any of the Testbed nodes, but we still speak of the Experimenter’s code as executing in those nodes.

The AERPAW Portal keeps track of Users. A User has different attributes, and one of them is Roles. A User that has an Experimenter role is able to create and access Experiments.

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