WS-PGRADE/gUSE-Based Science Gateways in Teaching - Science Gateways for Distributed Computing Infrastructures - page 217

section of the MOOC aims to raise the awareness
of students for workflow management systems and portals as entry points to
facilitate Grid usage. The students gain hands-on experience in the use of the
WS-PGRADE platform by learning the basic portal utilities and also get into
constructing and executing simple and advanced workflows on diverse infrastruc-
tures, including a cluster and the Grid infrastructure.
The MOOC itself is hosted on a platform developed by the University of
Amsterdam ( http://mooc.uva.nl/ ) . Using Grid computing tools and speci

The ' Workflow Management '

cally
WS-PGRADE throughout the MOOC requires several arrangements. These are
mainly related to providing Grid certi cates to students worldwide, getting them to

join the tutor VO, but also distributing virtual machines (VM) that can be run on
their own work-stations, and where all the software is previously installed. The
WS-PGRADE is installed and con

gured on a VM along with other tools such as
TORQUE for clustering and gLite-toolkit for grid computing. The VM is provided
in the OVA format, which works with various players. This approach effectively
reduces the administrative challenges of handling a massive number of student
accounts on a centralized WS-PGRADE service. On the other hand, this approach is
more demanding on the students, who need to install and run the VM in their own
environments. Considering the target audience for this course, this requirement was
considered acceptable.
The workflow management and WS-PGRADE topics are presented via lectures,
mandatory quizzes and recommended practical assignments. As part of the lectures,
we present animations showing the workflow lifecycle and a use case of the
WS-PGRADE underlying technology on distributed computing infrastructures —

the VisIVO science gateway described in Chap. 13 . The hands-on part involves a
range of assignments regarding workflow development and execution, split/merge
and parameter sweep examples, and grid storage access via the portal. Students
carry out the assignments using a precon

gured account on the WS-PGRADE
portal installed on their VM. Moreover, they are given the opportunity to test their
new knowledge at their own pace, by submitting the workflows to the PBS cluster
con

gured in the VM and to EGI.
The first course attracted around 350 participants, 10 % of which managed to

finish the course successfully. This is a typical percentage of success for the
majority of available MOOCs. Measuring the direct effect of the MOOC is not
possible due to the online provision of the course and the massive number of
unknown users. Nevertheless, various threads about WS-PGRADE were opened in
the discussion forums, and 45 students completed the quiz dedicated to workflow
management with 76 % average mark. The questionnaire handed-out to the course
participants suggests that 46 % will consider WS-PGRADE

in the future, and 63 % of the students have rated their abilities using the portal as
'

' likely ' or ' very likely '

' ' '

. In general, the provided VM with WS-PGRADE on board
enabled students to learn about workflows and to compare the usefulness to the
command-line interfaces for accessing the Grid, while inspiring other users with
system administrative skills to consider offering the portal to their related scienti

good or very good

c

groups.