Feature rich, enhanced grid portal for LONI

Well designed portals can provide user communities with easy and intuitive access to high performance computing resources, applications, collaborators and data. Generic portal interfaces can for example provide information about available compute resources, launch and monitor application across distributed machines, search catalogues for files and metadata. Customized interfaces can serve particular communities of users with high level tools specific for their applications and data needs, as well as provide a mechanism for these virtual organizations to share parameter files, configurations, workflows, data and visualizations.

Building on projects at LSU to provide application portals to petroleum engineers, coastal scientists, and astrophysicists, and general user portals to LSU HPC users and LONI (Louisiana Optical Network Initiative) users, we will present the work being undertaken to provide new capabilities to the LONI community through the NSF CyberTools project. This work will extend the existing LONI Grid Portal [1] [3] to provide interfaces to the advanced cyberinfrastructure being developed in CyberTools and deployed across LONI to enable scientific research, including co-allocation of resources (HARC), data management (PetaShare), HPC toolkits (Cactus), Grid development toolkits (SAGA).

The current LONI portal is being extended to use the VINE toolkit [2] for enhanced authentication and authorization, grid administration specific modules, for configuration of the essential grid-provided services (gridftp, etc.), support for the Grid and Monitoring services that are part of TeraGrid CTSS software stack, security and event monitoring portlets, including alert notification and extended and detailed system resource monitoring interface via the portal.

Two particular capabilities which are important for the LONI portal which will be researched in this work are high availability and support for virtual organizations. To support the LONI community, a portal is needed that can sustain a large number of concurrently logged in and simultaneously working scientific users. High-availability of the portal will be addressed by implementing a clustered application-server and portal setup, with a load-balancing frontend, that will appropriately redirect incoming requests to the portal having the most available resources. This will involve research challenges in portlet session replication across the clustered application servers hosting the grid portal, so that the user experience during a potential active resource depletion leading to failure, will be transparent and smooth. To support the various communities of scientists served by LONI, we are researching methodologies to compartmentalize user groups via resource access control, essentially enforcing a Virtual Organization (VO)-like membership authorization to Grid Portal-provided services.

This poster will present the current status of the LONI CyberTools portal, and discuss the plans for research and development to introduce high availability and support for virtual organizations.