Telescope is an open-source web applciation that tracks the progress of jobs submitted to remote servers using Sun Grid Engine (SGE) on-demand scheduling system. It allows remote scheduling of pre-defined pipelines, as well as re-schedule queued jobs. Moreover, output files are rendered in HTML in real time, allowing the use of markdown and rich-text features. Telescope does not assume anything from the remote server, except for SSH connection. The connection is stablished using SSH key pairs that are stored after encrypted.

For more information, screenshots and a live-demo, please visit our wiki.

If you are interested in learning more about Telescope, or if you want to join the team to contribute, don't hesitate in contacting us. There are several ways to contribute! Also, visit the Documentation portion of our Wiki for more descriptions of the software and details about the installation and running of Telescope.

This project started as an effort from the Collaboratory, a unit within the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biology (QCBio) at UCLA, and was developed during the Winter Python Hackathon. It is currently under development by a number of people from the QCBio community and various other labs. We are also working on a paper describing this system and how it can be used to help biologists to leverage the power of large computational facilities in a user friendly manner.

Quick start

There are very few steps necessary to get started with Telescope. For a step-by-step tutorial, click here or here.

Installation

The easiest way to install telescope is by using pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/QCB-Collaboratory/telescope

Running

Once installed, you will need two files to run Telescope: (i) a configuration file that defines your user's credentials and server address, and (ii) a small python script that starts the server.

1. Create a new file called config.ini with the following content:

[CREDENTIALS]
USER   = <USERNAME>
SERVER = <SERVER ADDRESS>

[CONFIGURATION]
DATABASE= <DATABASE NAME>

[MONITOR]
NUMUSERS = 1
USER1 = <USERNAME>

The password field is not necessary if you use a ssh key to connect to the remote server (highly recommended). Make sure to keep this config.ini in your current directory, unless you'd like to customize the path as described in the Wiki.

2. Then, create another file called RunTelescope.py with the following content (note: there is a copy in the test directory of the Telescope repo):

import telescope

server = telescope.server()
server.run()

Finally, run this python script:

python RunTelescope.py

This should automatically open a web broswer with telescope running. More details about RunTelescope.py can be found in the Documentation portion of the wiki.

If an error message appears, you may have found a bug -- we'd appreciate if you could report it. For more details, please visit our wiki or join the conversation at gitter.

Contact, bugs and suggestions

If you find bugs and/or have suggestions for Telescope, please

• Open an issue with a detailed description;
• Use gitter to talk to us.

Dependencies

Telescope can be self-hosted and track jobs from a list of users. It runs in Python 2.7* or 3*, with the following non-standard dependencies:

• paramiko
• pynacl
• tornado
• numpy
• configparser

These dependencies will automatically be installed if Telescope is installed using pip.

License

Telescope is shared under the GNU General Public License v3.0, please take a moment to read it. Permissions of this copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights.

Telescope
Copyright (C) 2017  QCB Collaboratory, et al

This material is a free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.