PHYSICS

New Toolkit Increases Productivity and Effectiveness - The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) has released its most recent version of the Grid Portal Toolkit (GridPort), version 3.0. GridPort is a toolkit that facilitates computational science by aiding in the development of science portals and applications on top of underlying grid computing infrastructure. In particular, GridPort provides a comprehensive set of capabilities for using distributed computing resources via a simple and consistent application program interface for building grid portals and applications. The 3.0 release has several new features and installation improvements from the beta version released in February. The new features include improvements to GridPort architecture, administration client, demo portal, and enhanced GridPort usability. “The improved install and testing features and a complete demonstration portal will help developers use GridPort to create portals more quickly and with less effort,” says Maytal Dahan, project manager for GridPort 3.0. The improved GridPort architecture now uses Hibernate for internal object and relational mapping for persistence. Hibernate delivers a high-performance, open source persistence framework that can greatly reduce the amount of time and effort needed to code, test, and deploy reliable applications. Also, Hibernate creates a considerably smaller footprint within the code, making the code more maintainable. Historical queries have been added to GridPort’s informational capabilities and the administration client now has more flexible editing features as well as new help documentation for users. Three important new portlets have been added to the demonstration portal- historical portlet, command execution, and batch job submission. The historical portlet allows a user to see a graphical interface of archived grid data such as the load of a system over a day, week or month. The batch and command execution portlets allow a user to execute interactive commands and submit batch jobs to a remote system. The usability of GridPort is greatly improved in version 3.0 and there is a much easier installation process. Also, GridPort 3.0 needs only a single configuration file that has all the parameters to test GridPort and generates HTML reports for easy comprehension. The new improvements will enhance the efficiency and increase the productivity of the users of the toolkit. GridPort 3 will be included in the next NMI Grid Release and is an important tool being implemented on UT Grid, a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure project to bring a distributed-knowledge environment to UT Austin research and education. TACC is offering a Building Grid Enabled Portals Using GridPort 3 course this summer. Please see GridPort Training: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/services/training/grid_portal.php for more details. For more information about GridPort 3.0, see the Release Notes: http://dev.gridport.net/index.cgi?action=releases/gridport3.html. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is one of the leading academic advanced computing centers in the nation. TACC’s mission is to enhance the capabilities of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and its partners through the application of advanced computing resources and expertise. TACC provides advanced computing resources and services to enable computationally-intensive research and conducts research and development activities to develop new computing techniques and technologies. More information on TACC is available at www.tacc.utexas.edu.