Editor's Note: The Alliance is currently developing and deploying technologies to build and support the National Technology Grid. The three thrust activities involve collaborations with other groups establishing similar grid environments. The Alliance is working with NPACI, NASA IPG, and Argonne National Lab to increase the services available to the national high-performance user community. Three issues of data link are providing background information about the thrust areas: Virtual Machine Room in May, the user portal in June, and the Access Grid in July.

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"Our goal is to help researchers manage their science,
not the resources they use to do their science."
--John Towns
NCSA Division Director for Scientific Computing
April 2000

Alliance on Track to Enhance Services

Alliance Developing HPC User Portal

"Portal is a new term, generally synonymous with gateway, for a World Wide Web site that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users when they get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an anchor site. A number of large access providers offer portals to the Web for their own users."

This definition from the whatis.com website succinctly explains the wherefore and why of a portal. Of course, staff at whatis.com don't know about the Alliance plans to provide a user portal for high-performance and high-throughput users of Alliance systems. This specialized portal is expected to provide a set of web-based tools and information integrated into a single user environment that Alliance users can use to work in the Virtual Machine Room (VMR).

The Alliance is developing this niche portal to offer a new way for computational researchers to use distributed resources in a grid-based environment. Researchers will be able to use their favorite web browser to interact with the components of the VMR. Use of the portal is optional; users can continue to work on code development, submit jobs, and retrieve data as they always have.

The portal is a customizable environment with several views. (See label #1 in this image.) Session information is saved so the portal always reflects the most recent modifications. Within the browser window, available elements include information windows, system status information, and tools. Each element (e.g., text, tool, graph) is contained within a tabbed, resizable box that can be located anywhere within a view. (See label #2 in this image.)The current portal allows for 5 views with no more than 9 elements per view. Tools can be closed to a toolbar and quickly reopened. (See label #3 in this image.)

The Alliance user portal is addressing the unique needs of computational researchers, which include security, allocation and job management, grid status information, and file transfer. A joint effort across the Alliance, the user portal development is spearheaded by Scientific Computing Division Director John Towns with programming and development work for the Open Portal Interface Environment (OPIE), the interface framework for the User Portal, taking place in the NCSA Communications Division.

Security

Alliance computational researchers are accustomed to and use security measures designed to protect their data and accounts. A number of authentication and authorization difficulties are encountered, however, if a researcher tries to use security credentials via web browsers and servers that do not currently have adequate security measures. The Alliance solution is called MyProxy, a system by which security credential proxies may be established and used by the portal and related VMR servers to take actions on behalf of a user. The MyProxy solution is designed to work well with the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI), allowing it to support a number of basic security mechanisms.

Allocation Management

Within the PACI program, a peer review proposal process is used to grant resource allocations. As staff in the Alliance Allocation team will attest, the proposal process requires an inordinate amount of paper for a PI to submit a proposal, receive review comments, and be awarded an allocation. In addition, current processes to add new researchers and staff and to track their usage are cumbersome.

An effort is underway to provide mechanisms for PIs to electronically submit their proposals and to receive reviews. Currently being tested as a stand-alone service, this effort will be leveraged and integrated into the user portal. The Alliance also expects to provide a simple interface for PIs to perform allocation management functions.

Post allocation, a basic need is the ability to understand how efficiently and effectively resources are being used. Such information would let researchers understand how the members of a research team are making use of resources and plan for future runs. To satisfy this information need, an interface offering resource usage analysis tools is planned.

Job Management

An environment initially targeted primarily for compute-based work, the VMR must support a job that might make use of potentially any combination of available resources within the environment. The actual job execution is paramount but users are also expected to need information and services. The portal graphical interface provides user-oriented information such as system and queue status, job monitoring lists and graphs, and grid and network query tools. (See both items labeled #4 in this image.) Other tools are slated for development later this year.

The Alliance is working with its sister site, the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), on portal development. NPACI has been providing similar information and services via their HotPage that are implemented with CGI scripts. The Alliance expects to develop a more advanced interface making use of technologies such as Java server pages, XML, and scriptlets to provide greater functionality.

Grid Information Services

In order for the user portal to be adopted as a user interface to the VMR, it needs to provide considerable information about the status of the available components and services. Grid services, such as the Globus MDS, will provide the common interface to communicate this information between various sites and to users. The current prototype highlights tools for the NCSA Origin2000 such as system and job status information, but eventually all Alliance VMR resources will be included. Similarly, status information on mass store systems and network interconnects is needed. The Alliance hopes to leverage information provided by network probes such as the AMP systems deployed by NLANR to collect and provide current status information about network links relevant to a user's active and planned jobs.

File Transfer Facilities

Another one of the more difficult issues encountered in trying to establish web-based interfaces to high-performance resources has been establishing mechanisms by which data files might be transferred between various systems in order to execute application codes or to post-process output data. A Java-based interface will be developed that will leverage the MyProxy security mechanisms. The security will perform file transfers on a user's behalf between resources within the VMR and also allow for transfers to and from a user's local environment.

Users will be able to take advantage of a GSI-enabled FTP client (gsiftp) to transfer files between Alliance resources, or between Alliance resources and their desktop computers. The gsiftp command works like any standard FTP client, except that a username or password is not needed to connect. §

--John Towns and Ginny Hudak-David