Computational scientists often develop large models and codes intended to be used by larger user communities or for repetitive tasks such as parametric studies. Lowering the barrier of entry for access to these codes is often a technical and sociological challenge. Portals help bridge the gap because they are well known interfaces enabling access to a large variety of resources, services, applications, and tools for private, public, and commercial entities, while hiding the complexities of the underlying software systems to the user. This paper presents an overview of the current state-of-the-art in grid portals, based on a component approach that utilizes portlet frameworks and the most recent Grid standards, the Web Services Resource Framework and a summary of current DOE portal efforts.
The Resource Oriented Authorization Manager (ROAM) was created to provide a simple but flexible authorization system for the FusionGrid computational Grid. ROAM builds on and extends previous community efforts by both responding to access authorization requests and by providing a Web interface for resource management. ROAM works with the Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM), and is general enough to be used by other virtual organizations that use Globus middleware or X.509/TLS authentication schemes to secure a Grid of distributed resources. In addition to describing ROAM, this paper discusses the basic design parameters of a Grid authorization system and the reasons for the choices made in the ROAM design.
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