GenApp, Containers and Abaco: Technical Paper

GenApp is an NSF-funded framework for rapid generation of applications including feature rich science gateways. GenApp is being successfully used to produce science gateways wrapping scientific programs. Its organization is designed to simplify the process of adding new features and capabilities to generated applications. A limited set of definition files define application generation. To bring a new executable into GenApp, one creates a single "module" definition file. The executable must run on some compute resource accessible by the generated application. Installations of the executable on target resources may be complex. To simplify portability of execution, we introduce automatic containerization of defined modules and integration of container execution. Abaco is an NSF-funded web service and distributed computing platform providing functions-as-a-service (FaaS) to the research computing community. Abaco implements functions using the Actor Model of concurrent computation. We introduce GenApp integration of execution with Abaco as a resource.