TREASURE - The Remote Execution and Access Service Users Really Enjoy

Many, many years ago I worked on a prototype of a software ecosystem I called TREASURE - The Remote Execution and Access Service Users Really Enjoy.

At the time, I was running the infrastructure and application behind an international genomics service. The idea was that we could centrally manage all the software and data for genomic analysis, provide high-end compute and storage capability, and amortize the cost across 20,000 academics so that individual researchers didn't have to maintain it all individually.

Originally, access was via telnet (I did say it was a long time ago). After a while we enabled X11, so that graphical application would work (running X11 directly across the internet was fun).

Then along came the web. One of my interesting projects was to write a web server that would run with the privileges of the authenticated user. (This was before apache came along, by the way!) And clearly a web browser might be able to provide a more user-friendly and universal interface than a telnet prompt.

We added VNC as well (it came out of Cambridge and we were  aware of it well before it became public), so that users could view graphical applications more easily. This had a couple of advantages - all the hard work and complexity was at our end, where we had control, and X11 is quite latency sensitive so performance improved.

But ultimately what I wanted to do was to run the GUI on the user's machine, wit access to the user's files. Remember that the GUI is then not running where the software, genome databases, and all the compute power are located.

Hence the Remote Execution part of TREASURE - what we wanted was a system that would call across to a remote service to do the work, and return the result to the user. And the Access part was about making it accessible and transparent, which would lead to a working environment that people would enjoy using.

Ultimately, the core of TREASURE was originally a local GUI that knew how to run applications. Written in Java, it would therefore run on pretty much any client (and we had users with all sorts of Unix workstations in addition to Windows making inroads). The clever bit was to replace the java Runtime.getRuntime().exec() calls that ran applications locally with some form of remote procedure call. Being of its time, this might involve CORBA, RMI, SOAP, or JAX-WS with data marshalled as XML. In fact, I implemented pretty much every remote call mechanism available (and this did in fact come in useful as other places did make available some services using pretty random protocols). And then of course there's the server side which was effectively a CGI script.

The other key part was to work out which files needed to be sent across. Sometimes it was obvious (it's a GUI, the user has selected a file to analyse), but sometimes we needed to send across auxiliary files as well. And on the server side it ran in a little sandbox so you knew what output files had bee generated so you could return those.

Effectively, this was a production form of serverless computing running over 20 years ago. Only we called it GRID computing back then.

Another interesting feature of the architecture was the TREASURE CHEST, which was a source of applications. There were literally hundreds of possible applications you could run, and many more if you included interfaces to other providers. So rather than write all those into the app, there was a plugin system where you could download a jar file and run it as a plugin, and the TREASURE CHEST was where you could find these application. Effectively an app store, in modern terminology.

Sadly the department got closed down due to political incompetence, so the project never really got beyond the prototype stage. And while I still have bits and pieces of code, I don't appear to have a copy of the whole thing. A lot of the components would need to be replaced, but the overall concept is still sound.