Use Cases for Server-Side STEM [message #558870] |
Tue, 14 September 2010 16:48 |
Tero Parviainen Messages: 10 Registered: August 2010 |
Junior Member |
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I've been reading about CDO and thinking about the possible goals we could pursue with a server-side / CDO-enabled STEM.
To hopefully begin a discussion, below is a list of scenarios I've thought of. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on whether some of these scenarios are worth pursuing, or about any other kinds of use cases you may have in mind.
1. Collaboration through a shared repository
Multiple researches connect to a centralized "STEM Server" from the STEM installations they have on their own workstations/laptops.
Models, scenarios, and other components can be created by one person, and edited or used by others without having to pass around files. All changes are version-controlled. Change logs can be viewed, and previous versions of everything is available in the repository.
CDO even enables a degree of "live" collaboration, so that changes made by one person can be immediately seen in another person's STEM workspace.
I see this as a similar workflow as software developers have with version control, only potentially even more powerful, since CDO knows about live EMF models instead of just files.
2. Computing power
A researcher authors a scenario in their own STEM workspace, and sends it to a remote STEM Server which runs simulation(s) on it.
The server would typically have significantly more processing power than the researcher's workstation, resulting in a quicker simulation.
Further on, this track naturally leads to computing clusters where multiple STEM Servers are employed to run a scenario. Of course, as has been discussed, efficiently parallelizing simulations may prove challenging, but there is some low-hanging fruit here (i.e. Experiments).
3. Web-based simulation views
Simulations are run on a STEM server, which also provides web-based access to viewing simulations (maps, graphs, etc.).
The simulation can be viewed by anyone who can access the URL with a web browser, which might be on a desktop, laptop, or a mobile client such as a phone or an iPad.
The server would be able to play back recorded simulations, as well as to step through them forwards or backwards.
Simulation views could perhaps be embedded to other web pages such as wikis, similarly to what Google Maps does.
These web-based visualizations could also be mashed up with other data sets, such as political maps, terrain/vegetation data, climate data or weather data. They could also be made available on the Internet if the STEM server is so configured.
4. Web-based editing
The full capabilities of STEM are available through a web-based rich client UI which is connected to a STEM server. It would not be necessary for researches to install any special software to their own machine.
This is not really feasible in the short term, but maybe worth thinking about as an "ultimate goal".
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