Speaker
Mr
Maurizio Melato
(NICE srl)
Description
GENIUS is a powerful Grid Portal jointly developed by INFN
and NICE srl within the
INFN Grid Project . It provides to end users secure,
uniform, pervasive and
ubiquitous access to distributed, high-end computational
resources, services and
applications through a standard Web browser or through a
flexible Web Services interface.
EnginFrame and GENIUS greatly simplify the use of
Grid-enabled applications and
services, so they have been adopted by several important
industrial companies all
over the world and by many leading research & educational
institutes.
In particular GENIUS has been installed in many EGEE sites,
with satisfaction of
users and site managers and has been a core technology in
the context of the GILDA
dissemination testbed.
GENIUS allows to expose gLite-enabled applications via
Web-browser or Web Services
and, using different EGEE services, provides the users with
a wide range of
facilities to run jobs and to manage their own data in a
very simple way.
Based on the latest version of the EnginFrame framework by
Nice srl, the GENIUS
Portal can run services on a broad range of different
computational systems including
gLite, Platform LSF, Sun Grid Engine, Altair PBS, Globus, etc.
It supports several open and vendor neutral standards and
seamlessly integrates with
JSR168 compliant enterprise portals, distributed file
systems, GUI virtualization
tools and different kinds of authentication systems
including Globus GSI, MyProxy,
VOMS extensions and a wide range of enterprise solutions.
Thanks to work done during the last year, GENIUS fully
supports the latest release of
the gLite middleware. In particular it now allows to submit
and manage jobs in
queues, supporting different flavours like DAGs, Job
Collections and, in the next
future, Parametric Jobs. It also provides data management
functionalities towards LFC
Catalog and supports AMGA client integration.
Looking at the future of GENIUS, many important features are
under analysis and
evaluation.
Interoperability among different flavours of Grid middleware
is one of the most
important challenges GENIUS/EnginFrame is going to face. In
particular, in the
context of the A-WARE European project, a common interface
will be provided to access
gLite, Unicore/GS (DEISA project) and GT4 (TeraGrid project).
Moreover the main goal of the A-WARE project is to develop
and integrate services at
a higher level in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
context providing workflow
orchestrations and workflow design capabilities, hiding the
underlying complexity of
atomic job submissions to end users.
Summary
Based on the latest version of the EnginFrame framework by Nice
srl and thanks to
work done during the last year for supporting the latest release
of the gLite
middleware, GENIUS now presents some new important features and
improvements and it
is going to face key challenges as interoperability between
different flavours of
Grid middleware.
Author
Ms
Livia Torterolo
(Bio-Lab, DIST, University of Genoa)
Co-authors
Mr
Alberto Falzone
(NICE srl)
Mr
Andrea Rodolico
(NICE srl)
Mr
Maurizio Melato
(NICE srl)
