Scientific computing as a service

After a week of hard work, I’ve separated one of the core aspects of Mechanics Academy—its compute server—into a separate service with a clean, RESTful API. This service is called thinkbot, which I think is a pretty cute name!

I believe this was an important step to take, as thinkbot can now act as an easy-to-use scientific computing service that can meet general needs, well beyond those of Mechanics Academy. But much more on all that later.

With thinkbot, one can now do the following:

1. Submit a job (in Python; R and Octave support planned for the future):

   curl -X POST http://api.thinkbot.net/jobs/ -F"code=<some_file.py" [other metadata] -u username[:password]

2. Retrieve info about the job's status:

   curl -X GET http://api.thinkbot.net/jobs/3/

3. Retrieve results based on what was requested in the metadata along with the submitted code.

   curl -X GET http://api.thinkbot.net/results/3/u.vtk

Mechanics Academy communicates with thinkbot via AJAX, and can send it scientific computing jobs and retrieve results. Check it out:

More documentation, logins and actual science lessons using all this technology coming soon™.

March 28, 2013 — Read other entries