Summary, as stated on the official github SPOT:

SPOT is an open science platform on which researchers can visually analyse and compare the datasets from published scientific journal articles. It is also a visual data analytics tool for multi-dimensional datasets.

Page contents:

Prerequisites 

This article is written for end-user of the Spot catalog item. If you do not have sufficient knowledge about SPOT, please see NLeSC's SPOT: A Basic Tutorial with a CSV file.

Create a SPOT workspace

You can create a SPOT workspace with these steps:

  • Create a new Glossary#workspace
  • Browse through the catalog or use the search feature to quickly find Spot and click "choose" to select the catalog item and afterwards click on "continue"
  • Choose the Glossary#collaboration in which the workspace will be provisioned and press "Continue"
  • Select a Glossary#dataset or continue without one
  • As for now only the flavour "medium VM - Ubuntu 18" exists on our own HPC platform, so these options will be automatically selected
  • Lastly, give the workspace a name and agree with the terms and conditions to submit your request for a workspace
  • After about 5 minutes Spot will be accessible in the dashboard as a workspace

Use the SPOT component

The Spot Glossary#component together with the RSC-Nginx component installs the Spot program on a workspace with the operating system Ubuntu 18.04.

The Nginx provides the proxy for port 9966 to be mapped to the port 443, so you can conveniently browse to the application by clicking on the yellow "Access" button in the workspace, which can be accessed through the dashboard.

The Nginx proxy also installs a SSL-certificate for Spot so data uploaded to the application is secured.

The Spot component contains a customised .env file to specify "server" mode and to set 127.0.0.1 as the address on which the spot service will run. This is necessary for our proxy to reach the application. 

This is a quick overview as to what the Spot component does:

  • It installs NodeJS and several required other packages
  • It creates a directory and clones the Git repo to it
  • It imports the Nginx config necessary for the proxy
  • It installs the Spot application using NodeJS
  • it copies the customised .env file to the application directory
  • Then it creates a service to make Spot run consistently and be manageable with Systemd
  • Lastly, it starts the Spot service

If you need customization of the component, please see this page: Create a component (same for changing a component).

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