REMINDER: February EaaSI Network Call

EAASI Research Alliance Legacy Grant Phase
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Good morning and happy Monday, @us-hosted users and @eaasi-alliance members!

This is your reminder that our next EaaSI Network call is tomorrow, Tuesday (February 7) at 4pm ET / 3pm CT / 1pm PT. Please take extra note of the Zoom link and calendar info this month, as we have moved over from Educopia’s to Yale’s platforms for scheduling/hosting. As always, the pinned EaaSI Bimonthly Network Call Info topic will have the most up-to-date info; you will find there an Outlook link to download an ICS file to add the running call to your calendar system of choice, as well as a direct link to launch the yale.zoom.us Zoom room if need be.

This month our primary topic will be a (light!) survey intended to gather information on the current state of EaaSI usage and the Network - rough numbers, impressions, capacity etc. from the past six months. This is largely intended to help our incoming Program Manager (search ongoing, see more details below) have an accurate/recent picture of the state of the network. No prep necessary - please just come with your local insights and concerns :slight_smile:

If desired, please read on for a few asynchronous program updates:

  • Program Manager search

    • Convening search committee at Yale over the next week/two
    • Expecting the post to be closed approximately end of next week (~ Feb. 17)
    • Should allow for moving quickly to the interview stage soon after

  • Development updates

    • The EaaSI dev team and associated staff had two strategic meetings in January to lay out vision and next steps for two major areas of work:
      • Android emulation
        • Mobile emulation was a promised Phase 2 grant deliverable that had been investigated for incorporation into EaaS by OpenSLX but with uncertain status in active EaaSI nodes
        • Team confirmed that in the short-tem, installation media from the Android-x86 project can be used with existing EaaS QEMU containers to create functional Android environments that can interact with either the live internet or Software and Content object resources, with no changes to existing code or infrastructure
        • Recommendations and instructions for creating such environments are forthcoming and will be added to the EaaSI User Handbook
        • In the medium- to long-term, potential exists for automating installation of Android apps using the Android Development Bridge (adb) software and/or incorporating Google’s official Android emulator directly into the EaaS framework; these tasks have been added to OpenSLX’s research docket
      • Expansion of descriptive metadata (metadata about software) in EaaSI
        • Many features on EaaSI’s development roadmap, particularly around improved search and discovery, rely on a more expansive metadata model available to describe software products and computing environments (i.e. information not necessary to drive EaaS functionality, but that would greatly improve the user experience of finding and creating appropriate Environments for their use cases)
        • In parallel, Yale has been investigating the use of a custom Wikibase instance (maintained by Kat Thornton and the WikiDP project) to allow more thorough capture, structuring, and public sharing of metadata about software and EaaSI environments that have been gathered by Yale’s student Software Emulation Configuration team over the past ~4 years than the subset of that metadata that has gone into Wikidata
        • These two efforts have been brought into closer alignment with a decision to first pursue expansion of metadata in EaaSI by displaying remote metadata mapped from external sources - like Wikidata or the as-yet-unnamed custom software Wikibase, and potentially others - rather than assuming the EaaSI platform itself must create/store/structure all descriptive metadata
        • Moving forward on this assumption should allow us to build a more flexible metadata approach into EaaS that allows EaaSI nodes and networks to define their preferred schema rather than dictate a metadata model for the entire Emulation-as-a-Service framework
        • The development roadmap will be adjusted shortly to account for this shift in approach and targeted features/benchmarks
    • Steady progress continues to a new, tagged release of EaaSI to be made public this spring. Testing/QC has not begun, so we can not yet provide a firm timeline for release, but please use the Dev Updates to track ongoing work; I will make further announcements as needed when needed to prepare both self-hosted and hosted.eaasi.cloud users for upgrading