Software & Services Registration

If you are new to Software & Services Registration read Getting Started below.

Once you have software registration access and have logged in to the RSP:

1. Register (if needed) the Vendor Software and Service

2. Register your Packaged Software or Operational Software and Services

If you need additional Hosting Resources, Science Gateways, or Support Organizations defined, or have problems or questions registering software, e-mail help@xsede.org and mention "RSP software registration".

Getting Started

The Research Software Portal (RSP) enables research cyberinfrastructure (CI) users to discover operational software available on XSEDE or campus resources, through science gateways, and from other providers and operators. It also enables CI operators and developers to discover packaged software they can install and make operational for their users. The RSP software discovery interface is at https://software.xsede.org/xsede-software-discovery. This software discovery capability relies on a cross-institutional resources catalog that combines software information aggregated automatically from other catalogs and databases with software information entered manually using the RSP Software & Services Registration capability.

If you have a local software catalog you can use XSEDE's Information Publishing Framework (IPF) to publish your software into the cross-institutional resource catalog. If you don't have a software catalog, you can manually register software using the RSP Software & Services Registration capability. To request access to this capability fill out the Request Software Data Entry Access form. Once you have access you will be able to register:

• Packaged Software which must be provisioned or installed before it can be used, and which you are sharing by providing the URL to a source repository, source tar, vendor package, build recipe, VM image, or container.
• Operational Software and Services which is ready-to-use, and are typically accessed from the command line, through an execution environment on a specific computer or cluster, or as a remote network service.

Besides registering specific software packages or operational deployments, the RSP supports registering Vendor Software and Services information, which are the global attributes of software such as the vendor, description, and tags/categories. By linking specific software packages or operational deployments to a Vendor Software and Service, the vendor information doesn't have to be repeated for each package or deployment, and software discovery results can link all the packages and deployments of the same software together.

For example:

• Vendor Software: GCC
• Packaged Software: A URL to a specific packaged version of GCC
• Operational Software: The module name or path to an installed version of GCC on a specific computer

Registered packaged and operational software can also reference:

• The Support Organization of the package or deployment
• The hosting cluster Resource or Science Gateway

When requesting access to the RSP Software & Services Registration capability you should identify the support organization, hosting resource, or science gateway for the software so that RSP administrators can define them and you can reference them.

Registering Packaged Software

Guidelines for registering Packaged Software:

• Name: the short user facing case sensitive common package name
• Version: the software version, or the word "Latest" if you are providing pointers that will always reference the latest version of the software
• Vendor Component: select the corresponding Vendor Software and Service if available
• Support Contact: select the package support organization (this organization may support the package and forward software issues to the provider)

Register Operational Software and Services

Guidelines for registering Operational Software and Services:

• Name: the short user facing case sensitive common name
• Version: the software version, or the word "Latest" if you are providing pointers that will always reference the latest version of the software, or "NA" is this is for a hosted SaaS that is constantly changing.
• Vendor Component: select the corresponding Vendor Software and Service if available
• Support Contact: select the component support organization (this organization may not support the software itself, but is responsible for dealing with support issues)
• Hosting Resource: the hosting HPC, HTC, Storage, Viz, Cloud, or Gateway
• Science Gateway: the Gateway that is hosting and providing access to this component
• Type: select Network Service if users access this component thru the network, or Execution Environment if users access this component from the command line or thru file-system paths in an execution environment
• Network Service Endpoint(s): enter the endpoint URI in standard <protocol>:<path> format
• Execution Handle: enter the execution environment URI in the form "module:<module_name>" or "path:<path>"