ENHANCING THE COLLABORATIVE USE OF GRID COMPUTING
APPLICATIONS WITH A USER-ORIENTED PORTAL DASHBOARD
Dr. Thomas Choong
CEO, elipva Ltd
[email protected]
Chang Sau Sheong
Director, Software Development Lab, Welcome Real-Time
[email protected]
Abstract: Grid computing is a promising new technology that is growing in importance and applications that use the grid to federate scarce or expensive computing resources are increasingly being developed by academic and commercial organizations. However, one of the major inhibitions to its widespread adoption is the lack of an effective access mechanism that permits aggregation of the output from these grid applications as well as related content and complementary applications at the same time. While aggregating distrib-uted computing resources for grid applications, the aggregation of the application output for users is often neglected. Similarly, the aggregation of other related data and complementary applications to enable collaboration are also ignored. As a result, the output is often disjointed and relates mostly to technical, scientific or engineering specialists with computing background. This in turn limits other potential users and consumers of other non-scientific related grid applications. This paper discusses the current state of Grid portals in industry. It focuses on a proposed user-friendly portal based dashboard that will aggregate grid computing applications in a collaborative environment. It describes how a portal dashboard can provide a more user-friendly face to the number of grid applica-tions, the architecture and design of such a dashboard. The potential usage of such a dashboard portal within the Singapore’s Na-tional Grid Infrastructure initiative is also described.
INTRODUCTION
Grid computing is a promising new technology that is grow-ing in importance; and applications that use the grid to feder-ate scarce or expensive computing resources are increasingly being developed by academic and commercial organizations. However, one of the major inhibitions to its widespread adop-tion is the lack of an effective access mechanism that permits aggregation of the output from these grid applications as well as related content and complementary applications at the same time. While aggregating distributed computing re-sources for grid applications, the aggregation of the applica-tion output for users is often neglected. Similarly, the aggre-gation of other related data and complementary applications to enable collaboration are also ignored. As a result, the out-put is often disjointed and relates mostly to technical, scien-tific or engineering specialists with computing background. This in turn limits other potential users and consumers of other non-scientific related grid applications. This paper dis-cusses the current state of Grid portals in industry. It focuses on a proposed user-friendly portal based dashboard that will aggregate grid computing applications in a collaborative envi-ronment. The concept of portal framework to speed up the development of customized applications is discussed. It de-scribes how a portal dashboard can provide a more user-friendly face to the number of grid applications, the architec-ture and design of such a dashboard. The potential usage of such a dashboard portal within the Singapore’s National Grid Infrastructure initiative is also described.
EXISTING GRID PORTALS
A number of grid portals exist today provides grid portal ser-vices to the users. Some of the more prominent ones are:
GridPort
The Grid Portal Toolkit (GridPort) is a collection of tech-nologies designed to aid in the development of science portals on computational grids: user portals, applications interfaces, and education portals. GridPort uses Perl on the server side and HTML/Javascript on the client side while using the Globus toolkit as its underlying grid technology engine. The GridPort tools were originally developed for the informa-tional NPACI HotPage, which allows NPACI users to access resources through a Web interface.
The GridSpeed Project
GridSpeed is a web-based Grid portal generation server that generates application portals for grid applications. Gridspeed is meant for a wider spectrum of users who do not expect to program or develop their own “glue codes” to enable the ap-plications on the portal. Gridspeed provides a respository called Gridspeed Portal Repository to allow users to publish and share their portals among other users and provides a sin-gle web-based user interface for users to interact with. Portal generation is assisted by a wizard, although generation through an application development environment like Eclipse
is also aimed at. Gridspeed provides a default set of services to the generated portal, including single sign-on, job monitor-ing, file management, user management and resource man-agement. Gridspeed also integrates the APST (The Apples Parameter Sweep Template) as a grid workflow engine.
Gridsphere
Gridsphere is a portal framework that is built as the portal for the GridLab project, which is funded y a European Commis-sion under the Fifth Framework Programme of the Informa-tion Society Technology. The GridSphere portal framework is an open-source portlet-based framework for building grid portals. The framework based its work from the Apache Jets-peed project, IBM’s Websphere Portlet APIs and the JSR-168 Portlet Specification by Sun Microsystems. Gridsphere has a portlet container that is used to manage the lifecycle of a portlet. Portlets need to be developed and deployed. It also has a set of presentation APIs used to present the look and feel of a portal. Gridsphere’s access control is based on the role-based access control model and has its own user man-agement module that manages the various uses and roles in the portal.
Gridsphere is a portal framework that is loosely tied with GridLab’s grid services by providing an additional set of Grid-related services including security management, re-source management, job management, data access and infor-mation services.
SunONE Grid Engine Portal
The Grid Engine Portal, formerly known as the Sun Techni-cal Computing Portal is a portal interface to access the under-lying Grid Engine from Sun Microsystems. The Grid Engine Portal consists of the Grid Engine and SunONE Portal Server 6.0 and allows the users to authenticate to a portal interface to execute applications, monitor status of jobs and up-load/dowmload files. Essentially, the Grid Engine Portal is a SunONE Portal Server that wraps around the Grid Engine.
The Grid Engine project is an open source grid engine that enables distributed resource management a wide range of re-quirements, from compute farms to grid computing. The Grid Engine was originally Gridware, a Distributed Resource Management software that was acquired by Sun Microsys-tems and later made open source. Grid computing according to the SunONE Grid Engine’s definition is distributed re-source management, specifically computing rere-sources.
DOE Grid Portal Development Kit
The Grid Portal Development Kit (GDPK) was first introduced by Jason Novotny from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Concurrency – Pratice and Experience journal in 2000. It was later taken up by the Department of Energy’s Science Grid, but is no longer supported.
The GDPK aims to provide both a portal development environment for the creation of new portals as well as a collection of Grid service beans used to accomplish basic operations such as job submission, file transfer and querying of information services.
The envisioned portal architecture is typical web applica-tion portal where access is through a browser to a web
appli-cation that communicates to the grid services via the Globus Java Commodity Grid (CoG) toolkit. The grid services are deployed on the Globus infrastructure. The GDPK is a de-ployed as a typical J2EE web application that is archived in a Java WAR (Web application ARchive) file to be deployed on a J2EE compliant web application container. The GPDK Java beans merely present an easier interface for web developers to use the CoG kit.
Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA)
The Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) is not a grid portal but a synergy between grid and web services. OGSA provides a set of interfaces and services that can be put to-gether to support the needs of a virtual organization (VO). Services provided in OGSA include resource allocation, ser-vice discovery and management and authentication and au-thorization. The OGSA provide the primitive blocks which a grid portal can be built or wrapped around.
ANALYSIS ON EXISTING GRID PORTALS
One emphasis in many of the existing grid portals is the ten-dency to fall back on the portal paradigm, which is to provide a single gateway to multiple resources, for ease of use in terms of navigation. Although this paradigm works well for community portals, but with grid portals, this paradigm falls short. A key strength of the grid is the aggregation of multiple sources of computing or other resources which is hidden and safely encapsulated by the grid. This allows the provision of a constant and uninterrupted source. For example, if the com-puter room catches fire and destroys all the clustered ma-chines, all computing and storage resources are lost. The grid protects against such disastrous downtime by aggregating a large number of resources to serve as an uninterruptible sup-ply. Note the oppositional paradigm offered by some of the portals – if the single source which is the portal fails, the grid is inaccessible, unless more than a single portal accesses the same grid, in which case renders the idea of a portal as a sin-gle gateway to the grid, meaninsin-gless.
Most grid portals, except for Gridspeed, emphasize on providing a toolkit and APIs that will allow applications to hook up to the grid through the portal. This means that the existing applications need to be modified and ported in a way such that the applications can be placed on the portal. The portal design follows the portlet specification in JSR-168, that is, a portlet is defined and developed such that it can be deployed on a portlet container. Gridsphere’s design is based directly to this model. The main issue with this model is that it is not reasonable to expect the users to build portlets to in-tegrate their application into the portal, when it already has to be ported to the grid.
Another observation from the current set of portals is a lack of a coherent standard, de-facto or otherwise. Each grid portal offers its own claims for definition of a grid portal with its own goals and targets to achieve. Many of the technologies provide building blocks and integration points, but most of the construction appears to be done at the back-end, by groups of developers. This can prove to be a stumbling block in the adoption of a grid portal for a community of users.
The surveyed grid portals also do not provide basic func-tions for a fully collaborative community portal. This is
im-portant because the grid is to be used by a heterogeneous community of application users, and not only by a single user. In such scenarios, it is important that these users are able to communicate and collaborate easily. Also, as a result of the heterogeneous nature of the community, the user interface needs to fulfill the needs of a diverse group of people. To do this effective requires a degree of personalization within the portal itself. The efforts by existing grid portals however gen-erally focus on single application functions and not the col-laborative nature of the portal.
INVESTIGATION ON THE IDEAL GRID PORTAL To identify the characteristics of an ideal grid portal, we need to take a step back and look at the spectrum of potential users of grid computing. These users may include members of the financial services industry, members of the digital media, life sciences, scientific and engineering, environmental, oil and gas and communications industries. Users may be a combina-tion of executives, analysts, engineers, creative designers, medical practitioners and scientists. Each has a varied techni-cal background but certainly all with their areas of domain or application specialties. These users would be concern with the use of the applications and deriving results from it, rather than the intricacies of the grid engine and resources behind it. They will be concern with the ease of use and complementary services to perform their tasks. For example, an economist doing some econometric modeling and analysis would be keen to analyze the predicted model along with host of other information and key economic indicators which is not part of the application. On the other hand, an automotive engineer in Japan collaborating with its out-sourced tooling engineering company may wish to conduct an interactive discussion on the design of the model while iterating the engineering analy-sis impact.
All the elements identified so far point towards a grid portal and dashboard that provides greater flexibility, extensibility, scalability, usability, ease of operation and management. The flexibility and extensibility ensures the ease of adding sup-porting applications and integration to other existing applica-tions. Along with ease of use, this would make grid comput-ing to become ‘embedded’ and users only need to focus on the applications and do not have to worry about the fact that it is grid enabled. Such a characteristic will also allow greater transformation of the portal into an industry vertical grid por-tal where attention is on the vertical industry specific func-tions.
For the purpose of discussion and illustration in the rest of the paper, the ideal grid portal dashboard will be referred to as Zephyr GPD for convenience. The characteristics of Zephyr GPD can be classified as follows:
Applications development and integration
Integrating existing applications into the portal to utilize the grid is the major requirement for a grid portal. Besides pro-viding the basic grid services, Zephyr GPD should also allow the creation of new applications. For grid-based applications, Zephyr GPD should wrap around existing grid toolkit ser-vices, for example the Globus Toolkit. For non-grid applica-tions, Zephyr GPD should provide an application framework
to enable the development and deployment of non-grid appli-cations within the same portal.
User Interface
Like all applications, it is proven time and again that ease of use drives usage of applications. A highly user centric user interface will be key to grid computing users. As such, a por-tal with wizards or toolkits that enable rapid and ease of changing layouts, look-and-feel or output are important. Simi-larly a gateway that transforms the output to multiple devices allows the portal to go beyond the desktop, to wireless and mobile devices.
Figure 1 – Application framework and dashboard provides rapid devel-opment
Content Aggregation
Content still remains a key component in a portal. In any pro-ject or community there will always exist a requirement to store, combine, index, and provide searching capabilities for or otherwise to aggregate content from various existing or new sources. Sources include content from the Internet, col-laborative sites, and intranets or even file servers. Any at-tempt to perform collaboration functions will necessarily in-clude content as well.
Applications Aggregation
Grid applications should not be the only application on a grid portal. There exists a myriad of applications that are useful or essential for a user besides those that uses the grid. Zephyr GPD needs to aggregate such applications, for example to provide a full-experience environment for the user. For ex-ample, the user will need to communicate and read his emails, and so requires the service of an email client.
Figure 2 – Aggregating applications and content
Collaboration
One of the portal’s main functions is to enable collaboration. In projects or communities of users, tools such as discussion forums, online chat, instant messaging, video conferencing and document management are the basic necessities to pro-vide for a community of grid application users.
Administration
Zephyr GPD needs basic administration functions as well, in-cluding user management, authentication, authorization and access control. It should also contain naming, discovery and directory services, resource management and brokering, scheduling and accounting services, Ideally Zephyr GPD should wrap around existing services such as the services provided within the Globus Toolkit, through a layer that pro-vides adaptability to potentially other different software.
Federated portal/dashboard
A federation of grid portals allows a peer-to-peer network of grid portals to be interlinked and developed over a single grid. This is important to provide for a community of grid ap-plication users over a larger grid. In this case, each grid portal in the federation performs specific localized functions and aggregates localized content. By linking the grid portals in a
peer-to-peer network, services can be subscribed to, ex-changed or traded.
Figure 3 – Peer-to-peer network of grid portals
CONCLUSION
The concept, power and benefits of sharing have with out doubt taken centre stage in recent years. In the 90’s there was the drive towards international and industry standards, open systems and universal programming languages. The Internet has been a driving force to make borderless and global shar-ing a reality. The recent moves towards open source, Linux and web services reinforces the movement of sharing and technologies such as grid computing, federated identity and others are all key to the success of sharing. The main chal-lenge that industry faces would be the availability of applica-tions that are grid enabled, usability, availability, perform-ance, management of grid applications
As defense technologies have often been borrowed and ap-plied successfully for commercial use, the same apply to Grid computing; borrowing the concept of commercial portals and dashboards for technical and scientific use. Besides the many existing challenges of grid, such as applications, computing resources availability and cost, Grid portal dashboard can go a long way to enhance the adoption of grid. In the context of the Singapore National Grid Initiative, a concept such as Zephyr GPD would, we believe accelerate the adoption of grids and further enable and support the various initiatives to make Singapore a service hub.
DISCLAIMER
The views expressed are solely those of the authors and do not represent their respective company.
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