Rapid is a cost-effective and efficient way of designing and delivering portal interfaces to tasks that require remote compute resources. The aim of Rapid is to make completing these tasks as simple as purchasing a book or booking a flight on the web.

The philosophy of Rapid is to deliver customised graphical user interfaces that enable domain specialists to achieve their tasks. These tasks make use of domain-specific applications that run on remote compute resources; a requirement which is satisfied by translating the task into one or several computational jobs to be performed on Grid and Cloud Computing infrastructures, and High-Performance Computing facilities.

Customised interfaces allow tasks to be performed without referring to terminology about the underlying computational infrastructure. Moreover, the system allows to expose particular features of applications as not to overwhelm the user.

• Download the latest stable release: rapidportlet-2.0.1.tgz
• Manuals and tutorials:
  • Rapid Manual (pdf)
  • Rapid Tutorial (pdf)
  • Flyer
  • Screencast of installation (with LifeRay)
• Screencast videos of portals created with Rapid:
  • Atomic scale materials modelling
  • Brain Imaging
  • Chemistry
  • Earthquake Prediction
  • Image Processing Example
  • Microscopy
  • Nano-Engineering
  • Seismology
• Publications:
  • Rapid development of computational science portals (J. Koetsier, J.I. van Hemert), In Proceedings of the IWPLS09 International Workshop on Portals for Life Sciences (S. Gesing, J.I. van Hemert, eds.), 2009.
  • A user-friendly web portal for T-Coffee on supercomputers (J. Rius, F. Cores, F. Solsona, J.I. van Hemert, J. Koetsier, C. Notredame), In BMC Bioinformatics, volume 12, 2011.
  • Rapid chemistry portals through engaging researchers (J. Koetsier, A. Turner, P. Richardson, J.I. van Hemert), In Fifth IEEE International Conference on e-Science (A Trefethen, D De Roure, eds.), 2009.
• Development pages: SourceForge.