Plugging grids into computing portals: the PROGRESS grid resource broker plug‐in mechanism

Abstract

SUMMARYThe grid research that has been intensely undertaken in the recent years has resulted in a long list of excellent solutions for the access to and utilization of powerful remote computing resources. Some of these solutions have emerged into standards or good practices widely accepted by the grid community. However, a lot of other important standards are yet to be found and the range of available middleware, protocols and services causes not only a serious problem when deciding on the technology to be used for a particular grid environment, but also poses a major challenge when trying to solve some ongoing issues. The lack of standards and heterogeneity of the grid middleware used is, for example, a big challenge when designing science gateways that are set to provide the scientific community with means of accessing the vast amount of the powerful grid resources delivered by multiple independent grid infrastructures administered by different types of grid management systems. In this paper, we present a method by which we addressed this problem within the PROGRESS project and how it resulted in the design of the grid resource broker plug-in mechanism, which allows the enabling of resources belonging to heterogeneous grid infrastructures within a computing portal.

Special Issue: Workshop on Grid Computing Portals (GCE 2005)

“…These are followed by papers addressing development in portal frameworks [24,7,22,21,29] and technologies [30,23], and application portals [28,33]. We conclude the issue with the review articles [25,26].…”

“…Technology presentations include portal frameworks and SOA/Web technologies [21][22][23][24][25][26], collaborative environments 1565 and workflows [27,7,28,29], grid usage [30], and sensors and instrumentation [31]. Application papers include a diverse representation of the types of applications that are being developed for portals, including water resource management [32], coastal observation [19], computational material science [33], collaborative informatics [28], and geology [34].…”

“…The papers in this issue are organized as follows: the top five papers are presented first, starting with the highest ranked paper by Zhang et al [19,27,34,32,31]. These are followed by papers addressing development in portal frameworks [24,7,22,21,29] and technologies [30,23], and application portals [28,33]. We conclude the issue with the review articles [25,26].…”