1. SimpleGrid Toolkit: Enabling Efficient Learning and Development of TeraGrid Science Gateway
Shaowen Wang1, 2, Yan Liu1, 2, Nancy Wilkins-Diehr3, Stuart Martin4,5
1. CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI)
Department of Geography
2. National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
3. San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
University of California at San Diego
4. Argonne National Laboratory
5. University of Chicago
November 11, 2007

2. Purpose Simply the learning of science gateways
Expedite the prototyping process of developing science gateways

3. Background Grid computing Science and engineering gateway
Problem solving environments (PSE)

4. Related Work Active area Examples
Evidenced by TeraGrid Science Gateway activities
Examples
Gridport
Gridsphere Vine
OGCE

5. The State of the Art
Evolving and sophisticated web portal technologies
GridSphere
Liferay
Sakai
Jetspeed
Missing simple, robust, and reusable interfaces between applications and portals
Significant gap between Grid technologies and application problem solving environments
Grid middleware complexity
Grid technologies focus on enabling resource sharing and federation
The development of problem solving environments requires extensible, programmable, reusable, application-oriented software components that support customizable access to Grid and VO capabilities

6. SimpleGrid Motivation
Grid and web portal technologies are complex, and still rapidly evolving
An effort to close the gap between Grid computing and scientific applications

7. SimpleGrid – Component-Based Design

8. Architecture – External Interfaces

9. Architecture – Internal Interactions

10. Efficient Learning and Development
Three-stage learning
Command-line
Grid-enabled java application development
Portlet development
Simple installation and deployment
Java, Ant, Tomcat, GridSphere
Globus Toolkit 4.0+ only for command-line stage
Reusable components for development
SimpleGrid APIs
JSP and Velocity templates
Development environment setup
Manual for SimpleGrid setup in Eclipse

11. From Individual to Community
TeraGrid command-line tools for individual use
SimpleGrid APIs to automate the access to cyberinfrastructure resources
SimpleGrid portlets to enable community access to scientific problem solving capabilities as deployable components in science gateway portals

12. SimpleGrid APIs SimpleCred: Grid proxy management
SimpleTran: Data transfer to/from Grids
SimpleRun: Grid job management
SimpleViz: Visualization component
SimpleInfo: Grid information provider
Under development
Current Grid information is provided statically through a configuration file

13. SimpleCred Fetch Grid credentials Automatic credential renewal
Local proxy loading or instantiation
Remote proxy instantiation through MyProxy
Automatic credential renewal
Simple interface for Grid proxy renewal, i.e., SimpleCred.get()
Grid community user support
A global SimpleCred instance can be stored in portal as a shared object for users using the same community account
Programming interface
load(), logon(), get()
Portlet interface
Grid credentials can be managed explicitly through a UserPortlet interface

14. SimpleTran A wrapper of GridFTP Threaded implementation
Allow responsive interactions between portal and client browser

15. SimpleRun A wrapper of GRAM and WS-GRAM
Support both GT2 and GT4 job submission
User selectable
Depends on SimpleTran to transfer datasets
Programming interface
execute()
getStatus()

16. SimpleViz Visualization mechanisms Threaded implementation
JFreeChart
Google map
ParaView (under development)
Threaded implementation
Portlet interface
Google map-based JavaScript library

17. Portlet Components and Interfaces
UserPortlet
User information and Grid credential management
Interface: JSP
Portlet: GridSphere ActionPortlet
DMSPortlet
A typical scientific computational analysis process
Interface: Velocity
Portlet: VelocityPortlet
Portlet container
GridSphere

18. Case Study
Two-dimensional spatial interpolation in Geographic Information Systems
Nearest-neighbor search procedure
Computing intensive for large spatial datasets and/or high-resolution interpolation
A fast two-dimensional spatial interpolation algorithm called DMS (Dynamically Memorized Search)
Parameter-sweeping application for sensitivity analysis

19. TeraGrid-Based DMS Analysis
Request an individual or community account on TeraGrid
Install DMS executables on three TeraGrid sites
Prepare a dataset on a local machine
Transfer a specified dataset to a TeraGrid site (e.g., NCSA)
Submit a Grid job to the specified TeraGrid site with a parameter value
The submitted job is scheduled to be executed on one compute node on the specified TeraGrid cluster
When the job is finished, the analysis result is written into the data directory of DMS installation on the TeraGrid cluster
Transfer the result back to the local machine
Visualize the result using the DMS visualization tool

20. DMS Analysis Portlet

21. Case Study Summary 16 participants
various levels of software development experience and Grid computing knowledge
2.5 hours, all participants including those with minimum Java programming knowledge
Master the SimpleGrid APIs for the DMS analysis
Successfully set up a portlet for the analysis in a GridSphere portal server

22. Concluding Discussion
The SimpleGrid toolkit
Makes an abstraction of generic Grid middleware services
Enables science gateway developers to concentrate on developing PSE by working on reusable and extensible software components
Hides the complexity of evolving web portal technologies by tailoring to application requirements for developing PSE
Service-oriented architecture
Component-based framework
Simplify science gateway development
Help overcome the learning curve of science gateway technologies

23. Ongoing Work APIs Automation tools Grid-based visualization SimpleInfo
Workflow
Automation tools
Enable automatic application integration as science gateway portal components (portlets)
User interface definition and generation
Workflow code stubs and Grid-related server-side code skeletons

24. Acknowledgements
CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI)
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
NSF TeraGrid

25. Demo