GRID SERVICE PROVIDER

Motivation

The PROGRESS project was aimed to build a grid access environment. This access environment was set to include a computing portal. When we started the project, early in 2002, there were already a few grid portal solutions available. However, they wouldn't deliver all the functionality we assumpted for the PROGRESS grid access environment. In particular:

grid access environments lacked flexibility: each of the deployed portals was stricly linked to one closed grid infrastructure
users must have relied on the grid middleware (e.g. to obtain their job execution history; for example Globus installations wouldn't provide much information if any)
standard user interfaces were not that much functional: they were simply web wrappers on Globus or other grid middleware
we were building two separate user interfaces and were faced with the problem: what if we need more than one user interface to grid services?

Grid Service Provider

As a solution to these problems we designed and implemented the Grid Service Provider, which allows you to:

manage your grid applications
submit your jobs to multiple grid infrastructures
enable your grid resources and applications in mutliple portals
save your grid job configurations and history

Grid Service Provider (GSP) is a set of high-level grid services. The GSP package currently features four services: Job Submission Service, Application Management Service, Short News Service and Provider Management Service.

Job Submission Service

The Job Submission Service allows to build and configure grid jobs. These grid jobs may be both: single task jobs and work-flow jobs. A configured job may be submitted to various grid infrastructures thanks to the Grid Resource Broker Plug-in mechanism*. This allows users to submit jobs to mutliple independent grids.
^* the GRB Plug-in mechanism is currently under implementation

Application Management Service

The Application Management Service allows to manage grid-enabled applications in a grid application repository. An application executable may be utilized in many application configurations, which constitute the grid-enabled applications in the GSP application repository; application arguments, resource requirements and other parameters may be assigned default values to prepare such a configuration. This allows to facilitate the use of applications by non-advanced users. It is also possible to build virtual applications, which hide work-flow complexity from non-experienced users; a vritual application consists of several or more component applications.

Other services

The Short News Service is an example of an informational service designed for use by web portals. We implemented this service as a proof for our concept: the PROGRESS installation of the Short News Service is utilized within the PROGRESS HPC Portal, this website and the website for Poznań Sun Center of Excellence. All these websites are completelety independent of each other and access the service in a concurrent manner. The Provider Management Service was planned to enable some sort of management of Grid Service Provider installations. It doesn't carry rich functionality, however, and is mostly useful to grid-portal environment administrators as it stores some useful information about the GSP services configuration.

Important features

Grid Service Provider enables business logic implemented with the Enterprise Java Beans technology via Web Services interfaces. This enables utilization of GSP services in multiple portals. We've build some core portlets that allow to utilize the services within portals. They are developed with the use of the PROGRESS Portlet Framework, which enables to quickly customize the portlets with no Java coding. GSP is designed to take advantage of Single Sign-On models: we integrated our GSP installation with the Portal and the Data Management System. GSP uses external authorization system to determine whether a particular user has the right to perform the requested operation on a given resource.

Get it now!

Version 1.1 of the PROGRESS Grid Service Provider can be downloaded here.