Extending the Services and Sites of Production Grids by the Support of Advanced Portals
P. Kacsuk (MTA SZTAKI (www.lpds.sztaki.hu))
Abstract:
The main concern of production Grids is to provide a 100% stable and robust Grid
infrastructure usable in 7/24 mode for a large user community.
In order to achieve this stability leaders of the production Grids are not ready to
take any risk with adopting and deploying newly developed services unless they
are convinced that these new features are also absolute stable and robust, and
generally accepted by a large user community.
Unfortunately, this is a 22-catch. If they do not deploy the new services, the
users have no chance to try and test these new services and hence they cannot be
popular enough to justify their deployment in the production Grids.
Another problem of the production Grids is that they require the satisfaction
of very strict rules for new sites that would like to join. As a result, these
production Grids cannot grow as quickly as it was expected in the beginning of
the Grid era.
These anomalies can be circumvented by advanced portal technology where the
portal is not simply a user interface to the production Grid but rather a
collection of higher level Grid services that can facilitate in many ways
the work of both Grid application developers and Grid administrators.
Such an advanced portal is the P-GRADE Grid portal that is the official portal
of two EGEE VOs: VOCE (Virtual Organization Central Europe) and HunGrid
(Hungarian VO of EGEE). Besides, P-GRADE portal is the official portal of
SEE-GRID which is a 100% EGEE based Grid infrastructure serving all the
countries of the South-East European region.
Recently, the EGRID VO of EGEE established a P-GRADE portal to support
their economics related Grid activity and the biomed community showed
interest to connect the portal to their workflow management engine.
Besides the EGEE community, the portal is successfully used as service for
several national Grids like the UK National Grid Service, the Croatian,
Turkish and Swiss Grid.
In the beginning P-GRADE portal was designed as a generic, high-level,
graphical, workflow-oriented portal to support the work of Grid application
developers by hiding the low-level, Grid technology specific details of
Grid program development.
After gaining many feedbacks from the portal users we have realized that a
portal can provide much more than single user access support for the Grids.
It can solve many problems that are not addressed satisfactorily by the
basic Grid middleware of production Grids:
1. Solving Grid interoperability
2. Extending Grids with volunteer sites without compromising their robustness
3. Increasing Grid reliability by
- Regular and automatic monitoring and testing of the underlying Grid
infrastructure
- Applying user centric testing and error-recovery mechanisms
- Pre-filtering the usage of Grid sites based on the Grid monitoring results
4. Providing better load-balancing among Grid sites by extending the broker
services of production Grids
The current paper will highlight these issues and will show how the portal can
solve these problems.
Keywords:
Grid Portals
