Introduction to Grid portals

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Introduction to Grid portals

• Gergely Sipossipos_at_sztaki.hu

MTA SZTAKI Hungarian Academy of
Scienceswww.lpds.sztaki.hu/pgportal
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Grids

• A Grid is a collection of software services that
  can join and leave a community

NGS

GS
GS

GS
GS
GS
GS

• Resource ? Grid service

GS
GS

GS

• Services are more or less standardised
• Standard interfaces
• Standard technologies

NorduGrid
GS
GS
OSG

GS
GS
GS
GS
EGEE


GS
GS
GS

• They can be accessed on demand by a set of clients

GS
GS
GS
GS
GS
GS
SEEGRID
SwissGrid
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A Grid service
Grid service
client
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Difficulties

• Grid services are secured
• You must obtain a certificate from a CA
• You must register at a Virtual Organization (Grid
  services offer themselves for members of VOs.)
• You must generate a short term certificate
• Grid clients are very low level tools
• Command line programs
• Platform dependent (usually Linux)
• Lots and lots of parameters

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Examples of Grid middleware services 1 Globus
Toolkit
Globus clients and applications
Grid Status
DRM
PUNCH
Cactus
Condor-G
MPI
Nimrod/G
globusrun
Globus Services
GRAM
GASS
Metacomputing Directory Service
Globus Security Interface
Replica Catalog
I/O
GridFTP
Local Services
Condor
MPI
TCP
UDP
LSF
NQE
PBS
AIX
Linux
Solaris
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Example of Grid middleware services 2 LCG2

• User Interface (UI)
• Information Service (IS)
• Computing Element (CE)
• Frontend Node
• Worker Nodes (WN)

• Storage Element (SE)
• Replica Catalog (RC,RLS)
• Resource Broker (RB)

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Example of Grid middleware services 3 gLite
Workload Mgmt Services
Data Management
JobProvenance
PackageManager
MetadataCatalog
File ReplicaCatalog
StorageElement
WorkloadManagement
DataMovement
ComputingElement
Security Services
Authorization
Information Monitoring
Services
Application Monitoring
Information Monitoring
Auditing
Authentication
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Different services ? different clients
implementation
interface
client
???
implementation
interface
client
implementation
interface
client
client
implementation
interface
implementation
interface
client
. . .
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The solution Grid portals!
THE INTERNET
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What is a Grid portal

• A portal is a web server that
• Provides each user with a repository of personal
  information and data saved from previous
  sessions.
• Is a website that allows users to customize their
  views of information and tools
• Examples
• Ebay, yahoo, Amazon.com, on-line banks are all
  portals
• A Grid portal is the gateway to
• Grid services

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Why Do People Build Grid Portals?

• To Provide Scientists with a way to access tools
  (services) hosted on a Grid.
• To make scientific resources available to a
  community
• Data, metadata, knowledge bases, directories,
  storages, computers, applications
• To provide users a way to organize their personal
  Grid space.
• To Shield the User community from Grid details

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Typical functionalities of a Grid portal

• User authentication
• Web security (e.g. namepsw) ? grid security
  (proxies)
• Data management
• Web protocols (e.g. HTTP) ? grid protocols (e.g.
  GridFTP)
• Job management
• Local computational resource ? distributed
  computational resources
• Visualization
• Application input/output/progress

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A few examples

• LEAD
• Predicting Severe Storms, workflow-oriented
• TeraGrid User Portal
• Providing users access to the US TeraGrid
  (Globus)
• UK NGS portal
• Job oriented, Globus
• GILDA
• Parameter study, application neutral, LCG2
• P-GRADE Portal, GEMLCA Portal ? Today!

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Summery and conclusion

• Grid portals are gateways to Grid services
• Turn special protocols to well known Web based
  solutions
• Can support different
• Middleware technologies
• Grid services
• Application fields
• Application types

You have to decide which portal fits best for
your needs!
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Thank you!
Gergely Sipos sipos_at_sztaki.huwww.lpds.sztaki.hu