Grid Portals

Grid Portals

ITCS 4010 Grid Computing, 2005, UNC-Charlotte, B. Wilkinson.

Grid Portal

• “A web-based application server enhanced with the necessary software to communicate to grid services and resources”

• “Provides application scientist a customized view of software and hardware resources from a web browser” [1]

[1] “Grid Computing Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality” ed. F. Berman, G. C. Fox and A. J. G. Hey, Wiley, 2003, Chapter 27 “The Grid portal development kit” by J. Novotny.

From a paper “GridSphere: A Portal Framework For Building Collaborations” by J. Novotny, M. Russell, and O. Wehrens

Grid Portals• Uses a Web browser interface

– Can use from anywhere.

• Hides details of Grid middleware– Good!!

Grid Portals• Provides

– Access to grid information– Access to grid services– Automated execution of applications/jobs– Workflow management– File management– Single sign-on to grid resources

Access to Grid Services• Security Services

– management of certificates– access to virtual organization (people)

• Remote File Management– access to files and directories– moving files

• Remote job management– job submission– workflow management

Access to Information

• Portals also provide access to information -- anything related to tasks at hand, including communication with virtual organization.

• In fact, some portals started simply as informational portals in the same vein as web portals such as yahoo.

Grid Portal Toolkit History

Several portal “toolkits” developed since mid-1990’s.

Used for application specific grid projects, orfor general-purpose grid portals

Three-tiered architectureTypical arrangement on early grid portals

From: The Grid Core Technologies by M. Li and M Baker, Wiley, 2005

Proxy Credential server

• Commonly “myProxy” credential management system.

• Used to store grid credentials that can be retrieved as needed to renew credentials for long running jobs etc.

Early Portal Toolkit Examples

1990s:• The Grid Portal Development Kit

(GPDK) (not now supported)– Used Java Server Pages (JSPs) fro

prosentation layer, and JavaBeans to access backend.

• NPACI Grid Portal Toolkit (Gridport) (National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure)

• GridPort 2.0– Perl-based Grid portal toolkit

• Ninf Portal– JSP/Java Servlet front-end– GridSpeed portal, an extension of

Ninf

Application-Based Portals

• Portals often specialized to a particular application.– for example, grid portal for high energy

physics.

• Portal toolkits give ability to taylor portal to application or user.

MPI program

Starting job

From a paper”Building GridPortals: The NPACI Grid Portal Toolkit” by M. P. Thomas and J. R. Boisseau.

NPACI Hotpage Grid portal(based upon GridPort)

Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

DOE Fusion Grid Portal

Adapted from slides “Reuseable Grid Portral Components” by M Thomas.

Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD)

Adapted from slides “Reuseable Grid Portral Components” by M Thomas.

NEES – www.neesgrid.org• George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake

Engineering Simulation– Large Installations of physical equipment for

earthquake experiments and simulations– Part of the award is to make equipment available

for remote collaborators

• Focus is on collaboration and experimental equipment sharing in addition to access to computation

From slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

Network for Earthquake Eng. and Simulation (NEESGrid)

Adapted from slides “Reuseable Grid Portral Components” by M Thomas.

• Early grid portals “tools” not very flexible.

• Tied to specific programming tools and grid software, such as Globus 2.4.

• Specific programming structure not suitable for users to develop portals themselves.

• Not standardized APIs.

Portal Implementation

• Should be flexible, meet grid industry standards, be able to be extended using parts developed by others.

• General approach currently is to use “software components” called portlets.

Software Component

• Object defined by precise public interface and includes a set of standard behaviors.

• Software components contained in a framework.

• Components follow a set of rules to interoperate.

• Installation of components should be easily done.

Portals with Portlets• Portal server consists of portlets• Each portlet provides certain functionality

and a window within the portal.• Each portlet can be associated with a

particular grid service• User can have any number of portlets as

he/she wishes (will be associated with user’s persistent context).

Portlets provided for:

– Management of user proxy certificates– Remote file Management via Grid FTP– News/Message systems

• for collaborations– Grid Event/Logging service– Access to OGSA services – Access to directory services– Specialized Application Factory access

• Distributed applications• Workflow

– Access to Metadata Index tools• User searchable index

Portal Server

MyProxyServer

MetadataDirectoryService(s)

Directory& indexServices

ApplicationFactoryServices

Messagingand group

collaboration

Event andlogging

Services

Portal Server

Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

Portlet Approach to Grid Services

Portal Server

MyProxyServer

MetadataDirectoryService(s)

Directory& indexServices

ApplicationFactoryServices

Messagingand group

collaboration

Event andlogging

Services

Portlet1

Portlet2

Portlet3

Portlet4

Portlet5

Portlet6

Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

A Pane and portlet

ProxyManagerPortlet

The currentVisible pane

Adapted from slides “The NCSA Alliance Portal and the Open Grid Computing Environment Project” by D. Gannon, G. Fox, B. Plale, M. Pierce, M. Thomas, C. Severance, G. von Lazewski, and J. Alameda.

Advantages of Portlet Approach• Easy to add new grid services and reconfigure

user’s view (context)

• Different software developers can provide portals to be plugged into portal– Many parties developing portal and portlet tools --

Jetspeed (Apache), Websphere (IBM), GridSphere, …

• Portal/portlet standard called JSR 168 emerging (portlet Java Specification Request open standard).

Portal Layout

National Science FoundationMiddleware Initiative (NMI)

• Started in 2001 initially over 3 years “to create and deploy advanced network services that simplify access to diverse Internet information and services.”

• Provides a centralized location for important grid software.

• Current NMI package includes Globus, Condor, MPI-G2, and:– a new grid portal project called OGCEGrid

(funding started Sept 2003).

Consortium established “Fall 2003 to foster collaborations and shareable components

with portal developers worldwide”

The following screenshots taken from http://www.ogce.org

Membership:Join/participate in different topic groups (Group tabs across top).

Schedule: Maintain a personal or group calendar.

Resources:Users and groups can upload/share documents and URLs.

Discussion:Participate in discussions with other members of your group

Chat:Engage other members of your group in online discussion.

Proxy Manager and Job Submit:Obtain/manage Grid credentials to access Grid resources through browser.

Also shown are GRAM job launchers and sample "ping" portlet.

LDAP Browser: Navigate LDAP server of your choice.

Grid FTP: Use your credential to browse remote directories/upload/download files.

Grid Context:Store arbitrary web objects (movies, web pages, audio

files) in a customizable, annotated directory tree.

GridPort Information Repository Portlets:Several GPIR portlets available for browsing.

GridPort Job Sequencing Portlets To set up sequences of jobs through a scheduler.

Anabas Impromptu: real time shared display, audio, and chats.

Newsgroups:Portlets allow users to participate in/administer online newsgroup.

OGRE Demo: use of OGRE for job management.

Java CoG Workflow:Portlet allows you to set up a Java CoG-based Workflow.

Application Management:Example interface around MyProxy, GRAM, and GridFTP.

Condor Portlets:To submit and monitor jobs through Condor.