Summer Scholarship Programme
Project Proposal

Project Title

 The TRACS web database.

Project Proposer(s)

 elena, mario (Supervisors: elena, mario)

Date of proposal

 2001/02/09 11:35:29

Project Details

Requirements: An SSP student that already has some experience of CGI programming ideally using perl. Knowledge of databases especially MySQL would be a definite advantage.

The TRACS Programme has been running in EPCC now since 1993. See:

http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/tracs/

This allows EC researchers to come to EPCC for a period of four to thirteen weeks to develop, optimise, parallelise their code and use EPCC resources to further their own research. As part of this Programme the visitor is given access to terminals which are owned by EPCC and are distributed to host departments, mainly located in Edinburgh, for the duration of the visit. In the past keeping track of these resources has been problematical. As a potential solution an on-line database accessible through the web is being developed that aims to aid in tracking this hardware and the visitor. The database, currently based around MySQL though the interface should be general enough to use any other database engine, can also be expanded to contain information that would be useful to those that administer the TRACS Programme.

At present there is a design for the database and an implementation to access and display most of the records. This is done using PerlDBI to connect to the database - again this makes the implementation independent of the database engine used to store the data. We would like to complete the existing implementation and then, if time allows, to extend the database and the access CGI scripts to extend the functionality and data that can be stored in the database.

Work Plan

This part is only very preliminary and will be extended nearer the time.

week 1: Courses.
week 2: Overview of the CGI program design & database set up.
Familiarisation with the existing implementation.
week 3: Write a perl script that will enter an XML file containing information about an applicant into the database.
week 4: Complete the input/output routines to the database.
week 5: Design and implement an administration layer for the database.
week 6: Design and implement a way for the EPCC TRACS contacts to enter information about their meetings with visitors.
weeks 7-9: Implementation.
week 10: Report & Poster Writing.

Computing Skills Required

The skills that will needed for this project are:

This will be gained during the project if it does not already exist. The Workplan above is only intended to be an initial guide for what will be done during the project.

Training Required

Computing Resources

In terms of resources - access to a workstation and the EPCC cluster should be sufficient.

Webpage maintained by mario@epcc.ed.ac.uk