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The Grid Portal Development KitAbstract1. Introduction2. Overview of the Grid Portal Development KitFigure 1. Standard 3-tier web architecture2.1 Grid Portal Architecture2.2 GPDK Architecture2.3 GPDK Service Beans2.3.1 Security2.3.2 Job Submission2.3.3 File Transfer2.3.4 Information Services2.4 GPDK User Profiles3. GPDK as a portal development environment5. Related Work6. Conclusions and Future Work7. AcknowledgementsThe Grid Portal Development Kit Jason Novotny1 ([email protected]) Abstract Computational science portals are emerging as useful and necessary interfaces for performing operations on the Grid. The Grid Portal Development Kit (GPDK) facilitates the development of Grid portals and provides several key reusable components for accessing various Grid services. A Grid Portal provides a customizable interface allowing scientists to perform a variety of Grid operations including remote program submission, file staging, and querying of information services from a single, secure gateway. The Grid Portal Development Kit leverages off existing Globus/Grid middleware infrastructure as well as commodity web technology including Java Server Pages and servlets. We present the design and architecture of GPDK as well as a discussion on the portal building capabilities of GPDK allowing application developers to build customized portals more effectively by reusing common core services provided by GPDK. 1. Introduction Computational Grids have emerged as a distributed computing infrastructure for providing pervasive, ubiquitous access to a diverse set of resources ranging from high-performance computers (HPC) to tertiary storage systems to large-scale visualization systems to expensive and unique instruments including telescopes and accelerators. One of the primary motivations for building Grids is to enable large-scale scientific research projects to better utilize distributed, heterogeneous resources to solve a particular problem or set of problems. However, Grid infrastructure only provides a common set of services and capabilities that are deployed across resources and it is the responsibility of the application scientist to devise methods and approaches for accessing Grid services. For this reason, higher-level tools often in the form of problem solving environments (PSE) are designed for specific application areas to more effectively take advantage of Grid infrastructure. Another difficulty in developing higher-level tools is the deployment and 1 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryaccessibility of application specific PSE’s. Scientists and researchers are often required to download and install specialized software libraries and packages. For this reason, while PSE’s are capable of providing the most direct and specialized access to Grid resources, we consider the web browser itself to be a widely available and generic problem solving environment when used in conjunction with a Grid portal. We define a Grid portal to be a web based application server enhanced with the necessary software to communicate to Grid services and resources. A Grid portal provides application scientists with a customized view of software and hardware resources specific to their particular problem domain and provides a single point of access to Grid resources they have already been authorized to use. The concept of developing a web enabled gateway to the Grid has been employed by several research projects including the HotPage user portal [], the Gateway project [], and UNICORE []. While the technologies and design of these projects differ, they share similar goals in trying to provide easy access to Grid resources and performing various Grid operations including remote job submission and providing detailed information on resources allowing the user or a super-scheduler to make better informed scheduling decisions. The Grid Portal Development Kit addresses many of the same issues related to providing secure, web-based access to resources as the previous projects, but differs in three important ways. First, the core of GPDK resides in a set of generic, reusable, common components used for accessing the various Grid services that are supported by the Globus toolkit []. Second, a portal user is provided with a persistent, customizable profile that contains information that is stored securely on the portal and provides details on past jobs submitted, the set of computers they have access to, and any other information that is of interest to a particular user. Third, GPDK is designed to provide a complete development environment for building customized application specific portals that can take advantage of the core set of GPDK Grid service components. In this paper we discuss the design and architecture of the Grid Development Kit with an emphasis on implementation and the technologies used. We also discuss the advanced portal development capabilities of the Grid Portal Development Kit followed by a discussion of related work and future directions.2. Overview of the Grid Portal Development Kit The Grid Portal Development Kit is based on the standard n-tier architecture adopted by most web application servers as shown in Figure 1. Tiers represent physical and administrative boundaries between the end user and the web application server. The client tier is represented as tier 1 and consists of the end-user’s workstation running a web browser. The only requirements placed upon the client tier is a secure (SSL-capable) web browser that supports DHTML/Javascript for improved interactivity, and cookies to allow session data to be transferred between the client and the web application server. We discuss cookies in more detail within the context of user profiles in section 2.1. Figure 1: N-tier Architecture The second tier is the web application server and is responsible for handling HTTP requests from the client browser. The application server is necessarily multi-threaded and must be able to supportmultiple and simultaneous connections from one or more client browsers. A large part of the design of the Grid Portal Development Kit is based on providing multi-user access to Grid services and resources. All other resources accessed by the portal including any databases used for storing user profiles or additional information forms the third tier, known as the back-end. Back-end resources are generally under separate administrative control from the web application server and subject to


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IUB BUEX-C 531 - The Grid Portal Development Kit

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