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Gridscape - A Tool for Creation of Interactive and Dynamic Grid Testbed Web Portals

Introduction

The notion of grid computing is gaining popularity recently as a realistic solution to many of our large-scale data storage and processing needs. Because, it enables the sharing, selection and aggregation of resources geographically distributed across collaborative organisations. Now more and more people are beginning to embrace grid computing and thus are seeing the need to set up their own grids and grid testbeds. With this comes the need to have some means to enable them to view and monitor the status of the resources in these testbeds (eg. Web based Grid portal). Generally developers invest a substantial amount of time and effort developing custom monitoring software. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes Gridscape -- a tool that enables the rapid creation of interactive and dynamic testbed portals (without any programming effort). Gridscape primarily aims to provide a solution for those users who need to be able to create a grid testbed portal but do not necessarily have the time or resources to build a system of their own from scratch.

Design Aims

The design aims of Gridscape are that it should:

• Allow for the rapid creation of Grid testbed portals;
• Allow for simple portal management and administration;
• Provide an interactive and dynamic portal;
• Provide a clear and user-friendly overall view of Grid testbed resources; and
• Have a flexible design and implementation such that core components can be leveraged, it provides a high level of portability, and a high level of accessibility (from the browsers perspective).

Gridscape itself consists of two key individual components - a web application and a related administrating tool-- that are implemented in Java by following MVC (Model-View-Controller) based, Model-2 type architecture.

Publications

• 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 

Software

The Gridscape software has been released under GPL license.

Web Portal Template:

•  Self-Deployable Web Archive (war) file 
•  Source Code 

Admin Tool:

•  Gridscape Admin Tool 
•  Source Code 

Software usage documentation:

•  User Manual 
• Gridscape Tutorial at IBM DeveloperWorks

In Practice

Gridscape has already been used by a number of organisations to create their Grid testbed portals for visualising and monitor resources. They include Australian Virtual Observatory and UK AstroGrid Collaboration, Belle Data Analysis Grid, and our own World-Wide Grid (WWG) testbed. An index of sites currently using the Gridscape software can be accessed at the following address: http://gridbus.cs.mu.oz.au/sc2003/gridscape_inter.html and the testbed portals can be browsed online.