2) Experiment Lifecycle Workflows

This section of the User Manual provides details of various workflows that allow Users to create, manage, and execute AERPAW Experiments.

Before reading this section, or attempting to perform the workflows described here, please make sure you have read Section 1 of this User Manual in its entirety!  Without understanding of the background, processes, and terminology defined there, this section (and other later sections) are prone to misunderstanding, and may create incorrect impressions of how the AERPAW facility can be used.

• Sections 2.1 - 2.4 focus on the AERPAW Web Portal, and how to use it to perform parts of the workflows.  The AERPAW Web Portal can be accessed at https://user-web-portal.aerpaw.ncsu.edu .

  • In a previous phase, the AERPAW Web Portal was hosted from a different location.  If you have bookmarked it, please delete or update the bookmark.  The AERPAW Web Portal will no longer be available from the older URL.

• Section 2.5 provides the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of the AERPAW facility.  By making any use of any part of the AERPAW facility, including information services provided by any part of the AERPAW team, you indicate your acceptance of the AUP.

• Section 2.6 focuses on the part of the workflow in which the Experimenter accesses the Development Environment for canonical Experiments (as defined in Section 1).  This part of the workflow is not performed on the Web Portal, but using other applications like ssh .

• The rest of this section provides further helpful information on engaging with the AERPAW Platform; Section 2.7 lists support options, Section 2.8 answers Frequently Asked Questions, Section 2.9 indicates how to contribute software back to the AERPAW Platform.

Note:

• The AERPAW Web Portal is designed to fit into your browsers.  If you shrink your browser window below a certain size, the navigation bar at the top will be automatically converted to a “pull-down” menu at the top right corner.  This appears as an icon of three closely spaced horizontal lines, which you can click to pull down the full menu.  However, it appears from experience that this pull-down action does not work correctly on some browsers.  If you do not see the Navigation Menu (initially it includes only a single "Login" item), please try maximizing your browser window.

• The AERPAW Web Portal has NOT been optimized for mobile devices.  We strongly recommend accessing it from a traditional desktop or laptop computer, such as your work computer.

• If you run into connectivity issues with the AERPAW Web Portal, please try one or more of the following measures: close the current browser tab and access from a fresh one, close your browser completely and restart, clear your browser's history/cookies/cache and restart, try from a different browser, try from a different computer.  This way you can localize the issue.

  • If all else fails, you can contact us; we are unlikely to be able to help with a local issue at your end, but it might help if we know what steps you tried.

• At various stages of the Experiment lifecycle, you will perform actions that prompt actions performed on your behalf by the AERPAW Platform that are asynchronous - some of these take only minutes to complete, others days or weeks.  To keep you informed of the progress of such processes, and notify you when they are complete, emails to you are generated from AERPAW Ops.  These emails come from either <aerpaw-operations@ncsu.edu> or <aerpaw@gmail.com> , please make sure mail from these addresses are not going to your Spam or Junk.

• While we have made every effort to ensure correctness, ease-of-use, and robustness of the Portal functionality, we are still in the build-to-operate phase of AERPAW, and errors may occur; we ask our User community to bear with us.  During your use of the Portal, if you see a message (in red font) at the top of the Portal window just below the Navigation Bar such as "The most recent action was canceled by the User or Operator", it may indicate that such an error has occurred.  Please contact  <aerpaw-operations@ncsu.edu> and provide full details of your workflow and actions just prior to receiving this message, so that we can be aware of this, and engage in troubleshooting action if appropriate.