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Gridscape II: A Customisable and Pluggable Grid Monitoring Portal and its Integration with Google Maps

Introduction

Grid computing has emerged as an effective means of facilitating the sharing of distributed heterogeneous resources, enabling collaboration in large scale environments. However, the nature of Grid systems, coupled with the overabundance and fragmentation of information, makes it difficult to monitor resources, services, and computations in order to plan and make decisions. In this paper we present Gridscape II, a customisable portal component that can be used on its own or plugged in to compliment existing Grid portals. Gridscape II manages the gathering of information from arbitrary, heterogeneous and distributed sources and presents them together seamlessly within a single interface. It also leverages the Google Maps API in order to provide a highly interactive user interface. Gridscape II is simple and easy to use, providing a solution to those users who don't wish to invest heavily in developing their own monitoring portal from scratch, and also for those users who want something that is easy to customise and extend for their specific needs.

Improvements in Gridscape II

The previous implementation of Gridscape and Gridscape II share the aim of providing a high-level, user-friendly and highly customisable portal interface in order to present the status of Grid resources. Both also interact with existing technology so that no additional installation or configuration of Grid resource is required. Major improvements over the previous implementation of Gridscape are that it supports the integration of multiple arbitrary information sources through an extensible design; it provides a simple customisation mechanism to allow it to be enhanced to meet the specific needs of each individual Grid portal. Other improvements are integration with Google Maps, simplified portal administration and the use of portlet-based web components which means it can be plugged into other Grid portals to compliment them.

Design Aims

The design aims of Gridscape II are that it should:

• Manage diverse forms of resource information from various types of information sources;
• Allow new information sources to be easily introduced;
• Allow for simple portal management and administration;
• Provide a clear and intuitive presentation of resource information in an interactive and dynamic portal; and
• Have a flexible design and implementation such that core components can be reused in building new components, presentation of information can be easily changed and a high level of portability and accessibility (from the web browser perspective) can be provided.

Gridscape II consists of 2 main components - the Gridscape Resource Monitor (GSRM) and the Gridscape Portal (GSP), and a shared library for data access, referred to as the Gridscape Core (GSC).

Publications

Gridscape II

• Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya, Gridscape II: An Extensible Grid Monitoring Portal Architecture and its Integration with Google Maps, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, Volume 23, No. 2, Pages: 153-170, ISSN: 1744-5760, Taylor & Francis Group, UK, April 2008.

Gridscape

• Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya, Gridscape: A Tool for the Creation of Interactive and Dynamic Grid Testbed Web Portals, Technical Report, Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab, Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineerin g, The University of Melbourne, Australia, July 2003. Also in the Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Distributed Computing (IWDC 2003, 27-30 December 2003 @ IIM Calcutta, India), Springer Verlag, Germany.  Here 
• Gridscape Developers Interview by Technology Research News Magazine. Here 
• Kimberly Patch, Tool eases Grid monitoring, Technology Research News, Dec.31,03 to Jan. 7, 2004, USA.
• Choon Hoon Ding, Hussein Gibbins, and Rajkumar Buyya, Create a grid testbed portal using Gridscape, IBM developerWorks > Grid Computing, IBM, USA, August 2004.

Software

The Gridscape software has been released under GPL license.

Gridscape II full distribution. Includes Gridscape Resource Monitor (GSRM), Gridscape Portal (GSP) and Gridscape Core (GSC).

•  Gridscape II (full) 

Software documentation:

•  Brief Installation Guide 
• See Gridscape II technical report for an example of using Gridscape II Portal.

The original Gridscape can be found here.