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

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.

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.

The key features of Gridscape II are the following:
    * It manages diverse forms of resource information from various types of information sources;
    * It allows new information sources to be easily introduced;
    * It provides simple portal management and administration;
    * It provides a clear and intuitive presentation of resource information in an interactive 
	and dynamic portal; and
    * It has 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.

The developers of Gridscape II are: Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya from the Grid
Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne,
Australia.

For further information or to download the "open source" Gridscape software,
please visit:
       Gridbus Project Web page: http://www.gridbus.org/
       Gridscape II webpage:   http://www.gridbus.org/gridscape
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------