ACADEMIA

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to announce the latest release of the GridPort Toolkit (GridPort). GridPort v4.0 allows developers in the scientific research community and industry to create portals to access their grid infrastructure via a web interface, which serves as a starting point for building custom grid portals - all in a lightweight, modular, easy-to-use package. "GridPort is one of the most successful grid portal toolkits ever developed, and the new release will be the most important version yet," says Dr. Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. "It will be the basis for portals at The University of Texas at Austin, across the state of Texas, on the TeraGrid, and with some of our international partners. Eric Roberts and his team deserve tremendous credit for developing a powerful and effective toolkit for making grid computing technologies easy to use." GridPort presents a consistent, streamlined set of portal interfaces to multiple underlying grid technologies and services. GridPort augments these grid technologies with rich, customizable web interfaces for displaying resource information, job scheduling and file/data management. GridPort is open source software that is released under Version 1.0 of the UT TACC Public License which can be found at its Web site. The Latest Release - GridPort v4.0 GridPort v4.0 is a set of portlet interfaces and services in the portal layer that provide access to a wide range of backend grid and information services provided by lower-level grid technologies including the Globus Toolkit, the Grid Portal Information Repository (GPIR), and the Condor workload management system. Portlets are modular web components that expose the backend services of grid portal user interfaces. Portal services support the portlets inside the portal layer by augmenting their capabilities in an extensible, reusable way while tying the portlets together to make them more cohesive. While the services stack is currently in its infancy stage, the GridPort team will be growing it over the next several months. Examples of services that v4.0 is capable of interfacing with include Globus GRAM, GridFTP, Condor, GPIR information web service, and the Comprehensive File Transfer (CFT) web service. GridPort v4.0 differs from the previous version in that it focuses solely on the portal layer of the overall architecture. GridPort v3.0 consisted of grid portlets similar to those in GridPort 4, but did not offer as many capabilities. Version 3.0 included features such as a common application programming interface (API) to provide a consistent interface to grid services; and the Grid Portal Information Repository (GPIR) and Comprehensive File Transfer (CFT) web services. With GridPort v4.0, GPIR and CFT have been pulled out of the GridPort project but are still available from the gridport.net website; and the GridPort API has been replaced with Java CoG v4, which is similar in functionality to the GridPort API, but provides a richer set of interfaces to grid services. The GridPort team made these changes to reduce the amount of duplication in developing a grid service API and to devote more resources to making portlets and portal services as capable and robust as possible. "GridPort offers a simple, easy-to-install software package that provides developers of grid-enabled portals a basic starting point for building custom portals," says GridPort Project Leader Eric Roberts of TACC's Distributed and Grid Computing Group. "Users of GridPort can use it 'as-is' or extend it to meet their custom needs. The GridPort team has made the install process easy enough that someone who wants to expose grid resources through a portal interface, but has little or no background in portals, can get GridPort up and running in just a few minutes." One important use of GridPort v4.0 is as a basis for the TeraGrid User Portal. The Grid Information portlet interface displays information about TeraGrid resources including status, load, and job queue listings. This allows users of the TeraGrid to get an "at-a-glance" view of all the resources on TeraGrid to help them make a decision about where to submit their job(s). "There is a tremendous increase in the number of groups that are building portals, such as in partnership with the TeraGrid science gateways program, tailored to the needs of particular communities," says Charlie Catlett of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, director of the TeraGrid initiative and former chair of the Global Grid Forum. "Gridport represents a significant technology with which these groups can readily build gateways as well as share common components." TeraGrid, built over the past four years, is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. TACC is one of eight supercomputing centers across the nation that together provide the TeraGrid's computational, storage, software, and instrument and visualization resources, along with user support and related services. Future Releases of GridPort Future releases of the GridPort Toolkit will focus on integration of new technologies such as Globus 4 (WSRF), metascheduling services, and workflow tools in addition to utilizing cutting edge web technologies such as AJAX and JavaServer Faces (JSF) to provide an even more consistent look and feel across all of the GridPort portlet interfaces. Also in development are application portlets that provide interfaces to applications in the areas of molecular dynamics, computational chemistry, geosciences, and weather forecasting. The driver behind these interfaces is to simplify the day-to-day use of important scientific applications. For more information, please visit www.gridport.net.