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Interactive Analysis in the Discovery Environment

VICE stands for Visual Interactive Computing Environment and is a part of CyVerse's Discovery Environment (DE).

CyVerse maintains featured apps from the Rocker-Project, Project Jupyter, and Visual Studio Code.

Our Docker images are built from community-maintained image registries (i.e., DockerHub, GitHub Container Registry, NVIDIA GPU Container Registry, BioContainers, with a few additonal packages for use in CyVerse DE.

There are a few common categories of featured interactive applications:

  1. Terminal Access

  2. Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

  3. Virtual Desktop Environments:

  4. Kasm based:

  5. Xpra based:

  6. Geospatial Xpra based (QGIS/GRASS-GIS):

  7. Web Server Applications

    • StreamlitApps, ShinyApps, WebGL, HTML5, etc.

CyVerse hosts the container recipes (Dockerfiles) of its featured apps on GitHub: https://github.com/cyverse-vice/. These images are maintained by CyVerse staff.

Getting VICE Access

Since VICE (the Visual Interactive Computing Environment) is a target for cryptocurrency miners, we require an additional verification.

To get access to VICE, your CyVerse account must be associated with a valid email address from an organization, an educational institution, or a government; e.g., an email ending with .org, .edu, or .gov. We do not grant VICE access to commercial email addresses, e.g., @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @msn.com, etc.

To request VICE access, visit the User Portal and Services; look for DE VICE and select the REQUEST ACCESS link.

You will be asked for a description of your intended VICE use: please give non-technical scientific details, and if you can, link an external resource (like a workshop or lab website) and funding agency.

Launching Applications

When you open the Apps Tab in the DE, there are several featured Applications immediately visible, these are all Interactive Apps.

These apps launch with their default number of cores, amount of RAM, and timeout, and without input data.

Instant Launching Apps

Pre-configured apps with base settings can be launched with one click from the Instant Launch menu.

These apps have 4-cores and 16 GB RAM pre-set limit.

  1. Log into the Discovery Environment.

  2. Click on the Apps.

  3. Select one of the Featured Apps.

  4. Adjust the following:

    Under "Analysis Info", for Output Folder click Browse and navigate to and select your new /analysis/ folder and re-name it, or leave it as the default name, then click Next;

    In Advanced Settings you can modify the resources used by the container (e.g., more cores, more RAM, or disk space for larger analyses) or leave the default settings, then click Next;

    Click Launch Analysis to launch your application.

    Your analysis should be available within one minute. If it takes more than five minutes, terminate the analysis and try again.

  5. In the navigation bar, click on the Analyses view.

    Your application will first appear as "Submitted" (this takes a minute or two; maybe more depending on both the size of the container and any additional imported data).

    When the Status of the launch is "Running", click on the running App under "Analyses"; a new tab will open in your browser.

Be patient, but not too patient with custom apps or large images

Featured images are cached on the resource nodes and should start in under 30 seconds.

However, newly updated images must be pulled from our container registry or from public registries.

Data Science and Machine Learning images can be two to twenty gigabytes (Gb), and may take five to ten minutes to download and inflate the first time they are run.

Even when the application has entered 'Running' status, it may take additional time for input data to be transferred onto the resource with the new container.

Accessing data from VICE apps

VICE apps have web access, so you can import data using methods like curl or querying external databases. You can also access your Data Store home and shared directories directly from a VICE app. Your home directory is found via the path work/home/cyverse_username/. You will also have access to any data shared with you in the Data Store via the path work/home/shared/. You will be able to read, write, and delete data from the Data Store from a VICE app, just as you would on a local filesystem.

Working with many files

Read/write speeds for single files are quite fast, but can slow down when accessing many files.

If you are working with many small files, it may be faster to keep your data in the Data Store in a compressed format (such as .tgz or .zip), then use cp to copy the data from ~/work/home/username/ to ~/work. Working with many small files within the VICE app's container will be faster than accessing them directly from the Data Store.

Speed benchmark for moving a folder with many CSV files:

moving storms_by_year/ folder: 23.5s

moving storms_by_year.zip: 0.07s

unzipping: 0.063s

Using Git and GitHub from VICE

The core VICE apps (RStudio, JupyterLab, and Cloud Shell) also have the GitHub command line interface installed. You can run gh auth login and follow the prompts to log in to your GitHub account, which will give you HTTPS access to push and pull from your GitHub repositories. You can read more about the GitHub CLI on their manual page. You will also need to run git config user.email "your.email"; git config user.name "Your Name" to configure Git to be able to make commits.

Working with Git repositories

For the time being, we recommend cloning repositories into ~/work rather than into ~/work/home/username, because the large number of files in a Git repository can make transfers to the Data Store slow. We are working on optimizing the git clone process to address this issue.

Instant Launches

From the Home tab in the DE, there are several apps that have an Instant Launch feature which allows you to start the app with a single click.

These apps launch with their default number of cores, amount of RAM, and timeout, and without input data. You can always import data using HTTPS protocols or iCommands after launch.

Quick Launches

Quick launch buttons are directed URLs that allow you to share an app with pre-set configurations. After selecting an app, you will be taken to the app launcher where you can select input data sets, and then set size and time parameters. Any public app can have a quick launch URL generated for it.

To use one of the Featured Launches listed below in the table, copy the badge (button link) to add to wherever you collaborate (a webpage, project notes, documentation, etc.).

To create your own Saved Launch, start by launching the app you want to use. This will be a good time to Favorite the app. In the "Review & Launch" panel, click the "Create Saved Launch" button. You will be asked to name your Saved Launch and check the box when prompted if you would like it to be public. Remember which app you saved, you will find the link under Details of the app you saved.

Last update: 2023-11-30