Gitlab and GForge - code/project collaboration

Service feature comparison between GForge (gforge.uni.lu) and GitLab (gitlab.uni.lu)

Service	Git	SVN/Subversion	ULHPC users	External Users	Static websites hosting
GForge	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
GitLab	Y	N	Y	N	N

Gitlab

Gitlab is an open source software to collaborate on code, very similar to Github. You can manage git repositories with fine grained access controls that keep your code secure and perform code reviews and enhance collaboration with merge requests. Each project can also have an issue tracker and a wiki.

The GitLab service is available to UL HPC platform users with their account and to their external collaborators that have a GitHub account.

Gforge

GForge @ uni.lu is a service offered to facilitate the scientific collaborations of people working at the University of Luxembourg. Inspired by the InriaGforge, the general principle is to offer easy access through projects to subversion repositories, mailing lists, bug trackers, message boards/forums, task management, site hosting, permanent file archival, full backups, and total web-based administration. The major features are listed in helpdesk website.

Access to GForge is through dedicated accounts, (requested by mail: admin@gforge.uni.lu), for both UL members and external partners.

Nextcloud - data synchronization

Nextcloud is an on-site file sync and share server, like Dropbox. It provides access to your data through a web interface, sync clients or WebDAV while providing a platform to view, sync and share across devices easily.

Etherpad - notes collaboration

Etherpad is a web-based collaborative real-time editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the participants’ edits in real-time, with the ability to display each author’s text in their own color.

Privatebin - secured textual data sharing

PrivateBin is a minimalist, open source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data. Data is encrypted and decrypted in the browser using 256bit AES in Galois Counter mode.

Galaxy - bioinformatics portal

Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research. It allows users to easily perform, reproduce and share complete bioinformatics analyses. The Galaxy service has been integrated with the Gaia cluster, enabling many users to work in parallel and use the computing power of this cluster. UL users have access to Galaxy with their HPC credentials.

XCS - visualisation portal

XCS is a web portal dedicated for visualisation sessions. It’s available from inside the UL network and externally through UL VPN.

It offers submission of visualisation sessions for pre-configured applications, accessing & suspending visualisation sessions, sharing of sessions with other users and (limited) data management capabilities (browse/upload/download).

It’s advantages are that the session survives even if the network connection is interrupted, it’s rendering on GPU nodes and thus fast (with 3D acceleration) and it’s fluid on slow networks since it uses intelligent compression.

Prerequisites

1. UL HPC account, you need your password to login on xcs.uni.lux
2. TurboVNC: Virtual Network Computing application tuned for maximum performance and compression with 3D applications
3. to use a specific application through XCS, its profile needs to be defined by the HPC team

Current applications integrated in XCS:

• MATLAB
• RStudio
• SAS (Statistical Analysis System)
• STATA
• ABAQUS
• VMD
• ParaView