The LEAD Portal: a TeraGrid gateway and application service architecture

Abstract

SUMMARYThe Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) Portal is a science application portal designed to enable effective use of Grid resources in exploring mesoscale meteorological phenomena. The aim of the LEAD Portal is to provide a more productive interface for doing experimental work by the meteorological research community, as well as bringing weather research to a wider class of users, meaning pre-college students in grades 6-12 and undergraduate college students. In this paper, we give an overview of the LEAD project and the role that LEAD portal is playing in reaching its goals. We then describe the various technologies we are using to bring powerful and complex scientific tools to educational and research users. These technologies-a fine-grained capability based authorization framework, an application service factory toolkit, and a Web services-based workflow execution engine and supporting tools-enable our team to deploy these once inaccessible, stovepipe scientific codes onto a Grid where they can be collectively utilized.

Devising a Cloud Scientific Workflow Platform for Big Data

“…Just like the way scientists interact with a Grid computing platform such as TeraGrid [21], they would need a similar interface in the form of a gateway or portal such that they can access resources in the back and run their applications without becoming experts on Grid or Cloud technologies. In addition to servicing job submissions and resource requests, the gateway can also manage user authentication and authorization, and keep track of resource usage and accounting related issues.…”

Special Issue: Science Gateways—Common Community Interfaces to Grid Resources

“…The LEAD portal [3] provides access to weather prediction simulation applications and services running on remote resources and includes the ability to develop complex workflows. A simulation may be initialized with current conditions derived from streams of remote instrument data.…”

Timely offloading of result-data in HPC centers

“…A slightly offline version of this scenario is a pipelined execution, where the output from one computation at supercomputer site A is the input to the next stage in the pipeline, at site B (Figure 1). Largescale user facilities such as the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) [8] and LEAD [7] that employ distributed workflows are already facing these problems and require efficient enduser data delivery techniques.…”