GRIDportal project

GRIDportal is a web based application portal which acts as a frontend to GRID computing. Its aim is to make common GRID applications like Abaqus, Matlab or BLAST more accessible to the user. Use of GRIDportal does not require any knowledge of Unix nor GRID computing whatsoever, all the user needs to know is how to use the given application, so the step from desktop computing to GRID computing should thus become a much smaller one than it otherwise would be.

GRIDportal, written in Python and based on Webware for Python, is meant to be modular, which allows quick development of plugins for new applications.

GRIDportal is built on top of NorduGrid/ARC middleware and depends on the middleware to function. This relationship between GRIDportal and NorduGrid/ARC also allows a user to access the entire NorduGrid network through GRIDportal (provided the user has the necessary credentials), thus making GRIDportal a gateway to a whole range of different GRID sites.

GRIDportal is developed by the HPC Project at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It was forked from Jonas Lindemann's LUNARC Application Portal and is distributed under the GPL licence.

Martin Matusiak - GRIDportal project manager

Deployment

For a live example of GRIDportal:

gridportal.norgrid

Download

Dependencies

Download

Download a release:

download from sourceforge.net

To download the latest version of GRIDportal, use subversion to check out the files from the repository.

$ svn checkout https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/grid-portal/code/gridportal/src/gridportal

Source code repository

To browse the source code repository, use one of the following methods:

viewcvs :: repository browsing

Documentation

System documents

GRIDportal whitepaper :: [pdf]
GRIDportal test report :: [pdf]

Publications

Presentation at Medisinsk teknisk forskningssenter (NTNU), Nov 10 2005 :: [pdf]
1st Nordic Grid Neighbourhood Conference 2005 presentation :: [pdf]
NOTUR 2005 conference poster :: [pdf]

Tutorials

Practical GRIDportal with mpiBLAST, Nov 30 2005 :: [pdf]

GridPortalToolkit

To get started with using GRIDportal, you will need to use the GridPortalToolkit.

Development

Requests for comments

rfc01 - authentication
- v1.1 :: July 08, 2005
- v1.0 :: July 06, 2005
rfc02 - [mpi]blast runtime environment
- v1.0 :: July 22, 2005

ChangeLog

22 October 2005, Martin Matusiak:

+++ release 0.5.3.9, first alpha of mpiblast plugin
+ Plugin system reorganized
+ mpiBLAST plugin released
+ Unused plugins pruned


5 October 2005, Martin Matusiak:

+ Now enforcing all requests to be processed in a secure channel (https)


29 September 2005, Martin Matusiak:

+++ release 0.5.3
A feature release above all, some bugfixes
+ Authentication model change from proxy upload to myproxy integration
+ GRIDportal now deployed with GridPortalToolkit
	(http://gridportal.dynalias.org/gptoolkit/www/)
+ Documentation added for the use of GridPortalToolkit


23 August 2005, Martin Matusiak:

+++ authentication switched from proxy upload to myproxy
In the old model, a user would have to generate a proxy locally and upload this
to the portal for every session. The new model uses myproxy as a credential 
storage repository. With the new GridPortalToolkit client application, the user 
will create a certificate and register it with myproxy, all done locally.

This adds a new dependency in the form of pyGlobus.


5 July 2005, Martin Matusiak:

+++ javascript menu replaced with SmartMenus5.5
problems with transmenu: 
- a bit cumbersome loading with animated slideout
- menu broken in Opera, buggy in Konqueror

SmartMenus was made to mimmick transmenu as much as possible, even though it 
looks slightly different. SmartMenus is bundled with test results from a wide 
variety of browsers and the menu was tested successfully in IE6, Opera8, 
Firefox1.0.4 and Konqueror3.4.0.