Login Web

Fig. 104 applies to this and following use cases.

The login process is responsible for receiving user login information, authenticating the user, and loading an associated user profile. Authentication is delegated to an Authentication Server that receives appropriate credentials and returns an acknowledgment upon valid user credentials or an error message given invalid user credentials. The process of loading a user profile is more complicated. A user profile is a collection of metadata that corresponds to remembered state and preferences for a particular user. Specifically, to INTERSECT, a user profile contains information about who the user is, what resources they care about, and collections of helpful logical recipes.

Drilling into resources, a user profile is a registry that contains connection criteria, file paths, etc. that are referenced using key-value criteria. This allows for the user to apply friendly names or aliases to resources much like a user creating custom names for web bookmarks. However, unlike URLs resources within the user profile may be more complicated such as they may cache connection criteria to databases and have saved queries to views within that database. Similarly, they could represent a file and a location within the file. Additionally, resources could be an index of user history analogous to a history within a UNIX bash console.

Drilling into the context of logical recipes, the user profile may record collections of templated activities that are commonly observed from the user’s activities. For example, if a user is commonly copying files from one location to another, the system may record a “copy recipe” that ask much the same as a template. It basically says, I’ve seen you do this type of activity before if you need to do it again I’ll help you. Consider a use case where a scientist has a multistep process within their history for setting up an experiment. Maybe the scientist must first copy a configuration file from a staging location to an instrument such as updating firmware settings. Then the scientist needs to move data to that local machine and allocate a compute node. Finally, the scientist needs to load the machine and execute a pipeline. Each of these might be independent line items within their history, but the system is smart enough to take collections of items within the history and build a directed acyclic graph from them. This graph is then represented as a template using the pre-existing state. The next time that a user wants to perform a similar operation, they can look in their templates section of their user profile and select a template that the system has learned from their history. Upon selecting this template, the directed acyclic graph is color-coded to illustrate when the state is preloaded example state or if it has been updated by the user. For example, the background of a directed acyclic graph node might be white for default state and green for updated state. The goal here is to aid the user in being methodical and helping avoid human error. Similarly, as the user uses the system more, the system learns more about how the user works and adapts so that the user can be ever more efficient in their activities.

Another aspect to a user profile is the means of sharing subsets between users. For example, if a user is doing something complicated such as installing Linux, it is very difficult and error-prone unless the explicit commands are shown. The ability to share these types of commands or scripts enables users to onboard and become effective quickly by bootstrapping off one another.

Login process for INTERSECT users

Fig. 104 Login process for INTERSECT users.

Preconditions

  • The URL https://intersect.ornl.gov/ must be live.

  • User has a valid and active ORNL account.

  • Authentication Server is live and reachable.

  • User Profile Service is live (optional, but preferred).

  • Federated Recipes is live (optional, but preferred).

Post-conditions

  • A user is verified against their username and password credentials.

  • If the User Profile Service is active, the user will have access to all of their predefined state, such as history and bookmarks.

  • If the Federated Recipes is live, the user will have access to a collection of templated directed acyclic graphs that are either standardized by a community or derived from an individual user’s rolling history.