Partner Organizations:
Other collaborators:
1. Texas Internet Grid for Research and Education (TIGRE): (J. Boisseau, PI, M. Thomas, collaborator), TACC is part of multi-institutional collaboration. See http://www.hipcat.net/projects/tigre.php for more information on TIGRE. For more information on TACC's role, see http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/projects/tigre.php. 2. UT Grid Project (J. Boisseau, PI): Heterogeneous campus grid project being built in collaboration with IBM. See http://utgrid.utexas.edu/project/ for more information. 3. SCEC Portal (M. Thomas): working with SDSC team to use OGCE for project portal. 4. SDSC Visualization Services Portal (M. Thomas). We are working with SDSC visualization group to convert existing portal to OGCE framework. 5. Cosmic Web Portal (M. Norman, PI): NCSA (Daues) and TACC (Thomas) are working with Norman to plan a new Cosmic Web Portal based on the OGCE release. This collaboration evolved in part out of the March presentation by Thomas at SDSC. 6. Molecular Dynamics Portal (J. Boisseau, PI): TACC is working with the University of Texas Southwestern School of Medicine to build a portal providing access to applications including NAMD, AMBER, CHARMM, and GROMOCS. 7. M. Thomas, M. Pierce, G. Fox, and D. Gannon are all participants in the DOE SciDAC project. Our major activity is building the Fusion Grid Portal on top of the OGCE base software. Project partners include the SDSC Storage Resource Broker team (R. Moore, PI) and the Fusion Grid (David Schissel, PI). This project focuses on Fusion specific application portlets and advanced services (such as audio/video collaboration), whereas the OGCE focuses on hardened, generic services. 8. Several OGCE team members work closely with the TeraGrid project. NCSA is one of the TeraGrid principal sites, and IU and TACC are extended Teragrid facilities. M. Thomas (TACC) leads the TeraGrid user portal team, which includes IU OGCE team member Marcus Christie. Christie has developed the TeraGrid System Portal prototype, based on the OGCE release. The prototype is available from http://www.extreme.indiana.edu:18081/teragrid/index.jsp. 9. D. Gannon (PI) and B. Plale (CO-I) are members of the LEAD project for atmospheric studies (University of Oklahoma, lead). IU leads the Grid and portal activities. More information on LEAD is available from http://lead.ou.edu/LEAD%20II/participants.htm. 10. M. Pierce and G. Fox collaborate with NASA JPL (Andrea Donnellan, PI), UC-Davis (J. Rundle), UC-Irvine (L. Grant), and USC (D. McLeod) to develop an application portal, QuakeSim, to support earthquake simulation applications. For more information on the QuakeSim project, see http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/dus/quakesim/. 11. C. Severance and other University of Michigan team members have had numerous external contacts: meeting with the interaction with the NEES project (throughout the year), interaction witht the Sakai project (throughout the year), workingwith the Collaboratory on Multiscale Chemistry (CMCS) throughout the year. 12. The Michigan group has also held collaborative meetings with the JISC Portal Group (2/2004 and 3/2004), meeting with the DOE Grid Portals Group (3/2004), meeting with SDSC (5/2004), meeting with GridSphere (EU Grid) (3/2004). For more information on JISC, see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/. For more information on GridSphere, see http://www.gridsphere.org/gridsphere/gridsphere. 13. Gregor von Laszewski has given a talk in January 2004 at GGF 10 about the design of workflow components developed on the Ant framework with its possible integration into a portal based on OGCE. 14. Gregor von Laszewski has given a talk in March 2004 at GGF 11 about the design of workflow components developed on a new workflow engine called Karajan with its possible integration into a portal based on OGCE.
Activities and findings:
Research and Education Activities: Activities and Findings Major Research and Education Activities The following summarizes our activities, based on the deliverables listed in the cooperative agreement. To summarize, we have developed a downloadable Grid portal system that is documented and simple to install. A live version of our portal also serves as our group collaboratory web site: http://www.collab-ogce.org. Outreach Deliverables The project team members actively participated in the outreach deliverables listed in the Cooperative Agreement. We were well represented at the Global Grid Forum, Grid Summer School, and Edinburgh meetings, as detailed in the 'Outreach' section of this annual report. We also submitted the initial draft of the portlets best practices document. The GGF Grid Computing Research Group went on hiatus during the period of performance, so we have switched our focus to the formation of the SAGA (Simple API for Grid Applications) Research Group. This activity is led by Gregor von Laszewski with participation from other team members (including Mary Thomas). The major thrust of this research group is (as the name indicates) to develop a common API for Grid applications, which will be directly used by OGCE portlets, among other clients. Grid Portals Consortium Collaboratory The initial collaboratory system was deployed at Argonne National labs and includes the www.ogce.org web site, with software downloads, project information and contacts, and a team CVS repository (viewable from http://www.ogce.org/viewcvs/viewcvs.cgi/). ANL also maintains public and internal mailing lists for the project. Because of difficult installation policies at ANL, the demonstration collaboratory is being run by Indiana University. This collaboratory is built from OGCE software and serves as a demonstration of our system: http://www.collab-ogce.org. Our project's initial web site, cvs repository, and mailing lists were put in place during the first quarter of the project (Sep-Nov). The collaboratory web site was made available during the third quarter (Mar-May). We also maintain an active bugzilla. Because IU provides a simpler environment for installing and running software, and because of numerous security instances at ANL, we are in the process of moving all collaboratory components to IU. The demonstration site, www.collab-ogce.org, has already been updated to include the contact information, downloads, documentation, and bugzilla links. Grid Portal Consortium Toolkit Our major deliverables were divided into two sets: one for Supercomputing 2003 and one to coincide with the GRIDS center R5 release. The SC03 release was made and was demonstrated at numerous SC venues, as described in our outreach section. We had an interim release in January that included some bug fixes and a significantly trimmed down list of jars. The second deliverable was released in late May. The releases were packaged as single downloads that included everything needed to install and run the portal except a)Apache Ant and b) because of licensing concerns, the MySQL JDBC connector. The basic portal download can be configured by editing a single parameter file and can be installed with a single command ('ant deploy'). The May release includes simple build options, allowing users to pick the desired portal content group (information, Grid, etc.) All releases were documented with FAQs, installation guides, user guides, and administration guides. The following were included in the SC release: 1. Discussion boards, announcements, chat and messaging portlets, calendar tools. These were delivered by the University of Michigan along with the Chef 1.0.7 framework that we used as the portal container. These use an internal (to the portal) event system. This release also includes basic group sharing capabilities for these tools and the ability to create group spaces in the portal. 2. Newsgroup and citation browser portlets, developed and integrated by IU. These were coupled to external services that are included in a supplemental release. 3. Remote file management portlets: these included the GridFTP interface of IU and the WebDAV-based document system of UM. The TACC GridFTP portlet was deemed to be redundant with the IU interface, so TACC focused on additional deliverables (below). 4. Grid Information and Monitoring services, including LDAP/GRIS/GIIS portlet interfaces (IU) and GPIR portlet interfaces (TACC). The GPIR initial release points to TACC resources for demonstration in this release. Full GPIR support was included in the May release. 5. Portlet interfaces to MyProxy (IU). All of these deliverables made use of the Java COG kit of the University of Chicago. COG developments during this period included an upgrade of the security libraries. The following were included in the May release: 1. OGRE client portlets and a sample application for interacting with the NCSA OGRE system for managing applications. This was renamed from the Application Manager Web Service in the cooperative agreement. The OGRE system is available for download and extensively documented as part of this deliverable. 2. Science application tools from IU. These interfaces to the XDirectory system, called GridContext in the portal release. The XDirectory server side was packaged as a separate download and is available through the OGCE website. The GridContext system, in addition to serving as a general purpose notebook, acts as an interface to the application factory services, allowing users to launch jobs, browse results posted via XEvents, and interact with applets. This deliverable was actually included in the SC release. 3. IU also included application manager portlets that demonstrate how to manage application information and integrate this into an integrated set of portlets that combine GRAM job submission and GridFTP interfaces. In the process of developing these interfaces, we also developed a JSP compatible portlet type that can be used in place of the normal Velocity-based portlet tools used by the other portlets. This can be used to integrate pre-existing JSP web pages into the OGCE environment. JSP and Velocity portlet development documents are available through the portal collaboratory website. 4. The GPIR system was integrated with the portal. The portal system itself included updated GPIR portlets in the main release. The GPIR backend services were included as a separate download. Documentation for running the OGCE with GPIR service installations was developed and included in the release. This release was validated against the GRIDS center testbed at the University of Wisconsin for the R5 release. We did find and document one incompatibility: the MyProxy portlet can only recover credentials from the 6.x version of MyProxy server if they are initially placed there with the COG MyProxy client. This is documented on the www.collab-ogce.org website, along with workaround instructions. We are working with the MyProxy team to resolve this problem. Additional Deliverables 1. We released several service implementations that can be run along with or external to the portal. These include a) the newsgroup system services, b) the OGRE server-side tools, and c) the XDirectory Grid Service (the backend of the GridContext portlet). 2. TACC include portlets and services for interfacing with Community Scheduling Framework services. CSF is a GT3 interface for accessing generic job schedulers, developed by Platform Computing through the GGF and freely available. TACC also developed a job scheduling system, with portlet interfaces, that can be used to set up multi-staged jobs across several grid hosts. This was included in the May release. 3. TACC developed and integrated a portal login system based on local Grid credentials rather than remote MyProxy credentials. This is set up as an optional build parameter. 4. IU and UM developed a MyProxy-based login system: if you choose this build option, your portal login and password will be mapped to a MyProxy client authentication. 5. The University of Chicago team developed workflow portlets on top of the COG kit. These were included in the May release. 6. We have also investigated the use of alternative single sign-on technologies for the portal. The Michigan group has, in collaboration with the MGrid activities and CITI at the University of Michigan, investigted the use of KX.505 credentials as a single sign-on mechanism for the OGCE portal. This sign-on mechanism combines Kerberos and PKI that bridges Kerberos authentication with browser-compatible PKI certificates. KX.509 and mod_kx509 need to be improved to be made more general and simpler to install. Also, PKI certificate trust chains are complext to maintain. Initial support for KX.509 was includes in the second release of OGCE. More work is needed before this is simple to use. The support will be improved in the next release of OGCE. Problems The major unresolved problem that we encountered was the integration of the NCSA metadata management system into the portal. By the time of the scheduled deliverable (April 30, 2004), this system was compatible with Chef 1.2 and not backward compatible with the Chef version adopted by the OGCE. To resolve this problem, we are considering a supplemental OGCE release based on Chef 1.2.
Findings: In its initial year, the NMI portal development project focused on software integration and packaging, rather than on specific research issues. We anticipate research into common service abstractions and design practices to support service-based portals to be addressed in the upcoming year.
Training and Development: We have been engaged in the following training activities. We include material developed after the NSF NMI award notification but before the official start date. 1. Dennis Gannon developed portal tutorial material for the 2003 International Summer School on Grid Computing. Gannon's talks are available from http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/presentations/ and http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/~gannon/, as are a number of related presentations. For more information on the Summer School, see http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/SummerSchool/. 2. Marlon Pierce developed training and overview material for a workshop on the OGCE Portal (assisted by Marcus Christie) at NASA Ames, April 8-9. Material from the presentations is available here: http://www.servogrid.org/slide/GEM/Ames/. 3. Gregor von Laszewski developed a tutorial for using the Java CoG Kit for Grid application and portal development which has been used in several conferences and is distributed through http://www.cogkit.org. In addition to the these external training activities, our project has included the activities of several graduate and undergraduate researchers at Indiana University and the University of Chicago/Argonne National Lab. TACC, NCSA, and the University of Michigan have relied upon full-time staff positions to meet the NMI goals, providing professional development experience for junior staff members.
Outreach Activities: 1. Mary Thomas, 'Reusable Grid Portal Components,' GlobusWORLD 2004, January 2004, San Francisco, CA. Available from http:www.gridport.net (All members of team contributed). 2. Mary Thomas,'Grid Portal Technologies,' presented to the IBM Austin Technical Vitality Council. December, 2003 3. Mary Thomas, 'Computational Grids and Portal Technologies,' presented at San Diego State University CS Dept. Emerging Technologies lecture series, March 2004. 4. Mary Thomas, 'GridPort v3: Enabling the Rapid Development of Web Services-Based Grid Portals and Applications,' presented at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, May 2004. 5. Geoffrey Fox, 'Portlets and Portals for Grid Computing,' presented at Johnson Space Center Houston February 2004. 6. Marlon Pierce, 'Component-Based Portals for Grid Computing NSF Shared Cyberinfrastructure (SCI),' presented at the Division Principal Investigators Meeting Washington February 19 2004. 7. Marlon Pierce gave a workshop on the OGCE Portal (assisted by Marcus Christie) at NASA Ames, April 8-9. Material from the presentations is available here: http://www.servogrid.org/slide/GEM/Ames/. 8. All OGCE participants gave coordinated demonstrations at Supercomputing 2003. Participating venue included the Argonne National Labs, NCSA, TACC, Indiana University booths. 9. Dennis Gannon has given talks on the OGCE portal at the 2003 and 2004 International Summer School on Grid Computing. Gannon's talks are available from http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/presentations/ and http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/~gannon/, as are a number of related presentations. For more information on the Summer School, see http://www.dma.unina.it/~murli/SummerSchool/. 10. Charles Severance has also participated in the 2003 and 2004 International Summer Schools. 11. Charles Severance, In addition through the collaboration with the NEESgrid activity one trip (4/2004) to Japan which began a process where US and Japanese Comptuer Science and Earthquake researchers will work collaboratively on developing a Grid portal for Earthquake Engineering.
Journal Publications:
Other Specific Products:
The OGCE portal release includes portlets for supporting grid services, collaboration tools, and information management tools.
The OGCE software is available for download from http://www.collab-ogce.org. It includes almost everything needed to install and configure a grid portal (Java, Apache Ant, and MySQL JDBC drivers must be downloaded seperately). The download is carefully packaged to install on Linux, Unix and PC platforms in a matter of mintues. It has been tested with Globus releases 2.4, 3.0, and 3.2 (including the GRIDS center R5 release).
http://www.collab-ogce.org/nmi/index.jsp
This is the OGCE collaboratory web site.
Contributions:
Contributions within Discipline:
Grids and Grid Portals: We have developed a downloadable, reusable, customizable Grid Portal system that is being used by other portal developers to rapidly deploy Grid portals. We have demonstrated that component-based portal systems provide an way to integrate many diverse portal projects, including collaboration portals, Grid portals, and information portals. Within these frameworks, components may be developed and improved independently of other components. We believe we have made a major step forward in eliminating 'one-time' Grid portal solutions.
As emphasized in our outreach and collaboration activities, computing Grid portals are important parts of many large scale Grid applications. Example grid applications currently or soon to be using OGCE portal software include atmospheric simulation grids (LEAD), earthquake modeling and simulation grids (NEESGrid, QuakeSim, SCEC), nuclear fusion analysis and simulation grids (the SciDAC Fusion Grid Portal). We further anticipate close interactions with the portal developers of the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Science in the next year: our teams share common members and use common software bases. TeraGrid user portals, currently in their planning phases, will provide additional user interfaces to grid resources. OGCE team members (M. Thomas, G. von Laszweski, and M. Christie) lead this design effort as part of their OGCE activities.
OGCE portal software includes the building blocks for building science portals, simplifying access to Grid based resources for scientist and engineers. The relevance of this work is described in 'Contributions to Other Disciplines.'
Our research and development activities include both graduate and undergraduate researchers. At Indiana University, two undergraduate students and more than five graduate students have contributed in part to the current release. At Argonne Natinal Labs, Gregor von Laszewski is a co-PI on a NSF sponsored REU site on Grid Computing and Bioinformatics.
Special Requirements for Annual Project Report:
Unobligated funds: less than 20 percent of current funds