Computing Seminar

The GridPort Architecture for Building Grid Portals

Mary Thomas, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Abstract

"The Grid" is the term applied to the infrastructure being developed to interconnect highly distributed resources (compute, archival, instrumentation, etc.) into a large, parallel, computational resource. Grid portals are emerging as a highly convenient mechanism for providing the general scientific community with a familiar and simplified web-based interface to the Grid and Grid services via the Web. The rapid increase in portal projects has led to a proliferation of solutions to the portal problem. While each solution is of interest, there is a need for protocols, interoperable standards, and common architectures to promote the sharing of information, data, and resources.

Our experiences in implementing multiple computational science Grid portals at NPACI has led to the definition of a unique, layered architecture for Grid portals that sits on the top of the middle tier of the classic 3-tiered Grid architecture and also interacts with the collective layer of the Grid . Our architecture is an extension of these concepts, and one that we believe will help to promote interoperability among Grid portals and portal-to-portal communication. The feasibility of this architecture has been successfully demonstrated with the implementation of several production portals. In this talk we will describe the toolkits we have built based on this architecture, and demonstrate the usefulness of this architecture with a discussion of examples of several production portals.