CSEgrid Portal: A Secure Web-based Solution For Providing Ubiquitious Access To Grid Services (Design, Development And Implementation Of A Prototype)

Grid computing is emerging as a revolutionary concept for performing high performance computations on the grid. The grid infrastructure comprises of a large set of distributed computing resources that are shared across geographical and organizational boundaries. There is a need within the scientific community for friendly interfaces that can be used to obtain ubiquitous access to the grid resources. In this work, we address these needs by designing and implementing a web-based grid portal system (CSEGrid) that provides the user with transparent access to grid services like job submission, job status and resource monitoring, data transfer between grid resources, etc. through a set of portal interfaces. The CSEGrid portal system utilizes commodity grid software and other grid middleware tools to enable users to perform grid operations through the portal interfaces. We also describe a credential management service in our portal design to handle grid credentials that are used to authenticate the user in the grid environment. The portal system relies on this service to provide a secure and convenient access to the grid services for the user, and also prevent some of the problems that arise with mismanagement of credentials by the users. Finally, we evaluate our portal implementation against some of the other currently available grid portal projects. The implementation of the CSEGrid portal will serve as an initial prototype for providing web-based access to grid services available on some of the resource clusters at UT Arlington.