Tapis UI - A Rapid Deployment Serverless Science Gateway Built on the Tapis API

The Tapis framework provides to researchers a hosted, web-accessible, application programming interface (API) for managing data and executing software on cloud, high-throughput and high-performance cyberinfrastructure. Tapis aims to reduce the expertise and effort required to utilize advanced computing technologies by abstracting underlying access and security protocols as well as scheduling interfaces used by these different resources. More than 15 actively funded projects leverage the Tapis project to accelerate their research, and many more use Tapis without formal engagement; over 50,000 OAuth clients have been registered in the platform since 2015. Still, utilizing Tapis requires web programming knowledge that most scientists and engineers do not have. Large, well-funded efforts such as CyVerse or DesignSafe employ multiple, full-time web developers over several years to build full-featured web portals on top of Tapis. These large projects must also concern themselves with the administration and maintenance of servers where the web applications run. This presents a difficult challenge for individual labs and small research groups that simply want to provide an intuitive, graphical web interface for their research analysis. In response, the Tapis project is developing Tapis UI, a generic, customizable, open source, web-accessible graphical interface to the Tapis API. Tapis UI is intended for small teams and individual researchers that do not have dedicated web developers on staff. Tapis UI employs a novel, “serverless” architecture that can be hosted directly out of GitHub pages, meaning that a research team can run a customized version of the application without having to manage any servers. The architecture of Tapis UI strives to meet the operational requirements and constraints of small science gateway teams. As a serverless web application it requires no dedicated backend or hosting infrastructure. Tapis UI can be deployed as a science gateway by forking the repository, configuring it to use an associated Tapis tenant and running a simple deployment script that publishes to GitHub pages. The demonstration instance of Tapis UI which accesses Texas Advanced Computing Center resources is deployed to https://tapis-project.github.io/tapis-ui. For science gateway web developers that are interested in contributing or customizing Tapis UI, the project has a layered approach that provides abstractions of Tapis REST endpoints. The lowest layer of Tapis UI is the @tapis/tapis-typescript NPM package. This package provides TypeScript object definitions and API bindings that are automatically generated from Tapis OpenAPI specifications. tapis-typescript can be used in any web framework, such as Angular or Vue. The Tapis UI application is built in React with a tapis-hooks layer that provides stateful data abstractions of tapis-typescript API calls. Tapis-hooks objects such as file listings or application definitions are represented by tapis-ui components that provide user interface building blocks. Finally, the application composes tapis-ui components into the deployed application with interfaces for authentication, system and file navigation, application launching and job management. The Tapis UI project provides a low-requirements pathway to help researchers stand up science gateways for collaborating and reducing the time to science using the Tapis APIs