BETTER ACCESS FOR REMOTE NETWORKED SOFTWARE (BARNS) - RUNNING PROGRAMS AT CENTRAL FACILITIES OVER THE INTERNET.

D. Richard and G. J. Kearley

Institut Laue Langevin, BP156, 38042 Grenoble, Cedex 09, France

Central facilities such as the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) typically receive a few thousand visits for experiments each year, many from scientists who are from other coutries. These visits are short, so that serious data-treatment and analysis usually begins when they return to their home institute. However, because much of the expertise lies at the central facility, there is a clear incentive to perform some of the analysis by using remote-access. This encourages collaboration and optimises the use of resources, but two recent developments have made traditional remote-terminal access almost useless. Firstly, firewalls are becoming endemic and these complicate all aspects of remote-terminal use, and secondly, many programs now use "X" which performs badly over remote connections. Distributing software is fraught with incompatibilities between operating systems and general maintenance problems.

We have created a server at the ILL (BARNS) which allows programs to execute on ILL computers but with input/output via the internet to "standardised" frames and applets within the client's web-browser. This overcomes the problems of firewalls, bulky protocols and platform dependence. A similar result could be obtained by using customised HTML-forms, CGI scripts and applets for each application, but BARNS treats this procedure in a unified way. The author of the application is relieved from elaborate scripting and security issues.

BARNS optimises the use of computing and network resources by running the CPU-intensive part of programs at the central facility whilst the clients web-browser is only used to generate input-instructions and to inspect the output. The basic GUI is designed in such a way that the application-specific part is separated from graphics and tools so that it is straightforward to write the application-specific GUI for almost any program. Finally, because BARNS is multiuser it can allow a scientist at the central facility and an outside user to run the same programs and to view the results simultaneously - each with his own web-browser.