A Collaborative High Performance and Grid Computing Portal

• Main Author: Akunuri-Venkata, Prathyusha
• Other Authors: Daniel S. Katz
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: LSU 2007
• Subjects: Electrical & Computer Engineering
• Online Access: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-10092007-100620/

The world of high performance and grid computing is so vast that it always poses constant challenges and high learning curves to researchers and scientists. A Portal-based solution facilitates a simple web-based graphical user interface that helps the non computer science users take advantage of highly evolving, on-demand, distributed computing to carry out their research activities. A collaborative portal brings together various resources, applications and services under one roof and provides a single point of entry and access to the users. This thesis work endeavors to build a unique High Performance and Grid Computing Portal that combines two existing high performance portals into a single unique portal that a user can easily access and use to carry out various high performance and grid computing tasks. This report addresses the requirements for building a high performance computing portal, the various solutions that can be offered, variations in the solutions due to uniqueness of each individual grid infrastructure, problems that arise in combining two existing high performance computing portals and solutions to these problems. As a test case, we have combined the CCT HPC Portal and LONI Portal both of which are developed by us. The portlets that have been developed during this work include, but are not limited to, network monitoring, grid accounting, reporting, and generic portlets that could be used by any high performance computing portal by making a few configuration changes. This work introduces integration of LDAP authentication with GridSphere framework for Virtual Organization centric view of the portal. This solution opens up two large grid infrastructures to the LONI and LSU grid communities through one web interface without worrying about different logins and grid certificates. This portal was developed based on the user's perspective. Access to the portal is controlled by the affiliation and role of the user in each or both of these organizations. The goal of this project is to be able to develop a single grid portal for both CCT and LONI grids. This eliminates the need to develop and maintain more than one portal and also makes it easy for the users to just remember one URL to carry out all their tasks on either or both the grids.