Description
Science is the main goal of the EGEE Grid Project, and goals are to run scientific applications on the grid to overtake the current hardware limitations. But before running the scientific applications at a large scale, the first challenge is to port them to the grid, and provide simple access to these grid-enabled applications. At this step, users are looking for standards; standards for the interaction with the grid itself, but also for running complex applications involving for example large bulk jobs or chained-jobs into workflows. Consequently, users seek various mechanisms to shield them from service API or CLI changes and to allow them to use the maximum number of resources. In this way, users are looking for high level interface such as portals to interact to the Grid, but although standard application programming interface (APIs) or Web Services at the programatic level.
Many communities habitually work through web portals or have other mechanisms for easy access to computing or data resources. And portals will certainly be the best way to provide an easier grid-access to the larger par of the scientific communities. There are several different portal implementations available and working with gLite. The same people will want to deploy also customized portals and it is important that the various EGEE policies are respected when deploying such services. In this way, the EGEE PORTAL working group, for example, aims to propose "best-practice" rules for the access of portals to the grid. That means for example that the portal should be able to store data and run job on the grid by delegation of real users, or with its own credentials as a service virtual user.
Building scientific applications on the grid are most ot time implying complex workflow of different services and software. These workflows permit the integration and the re-use of different existing or new scientific codes and services, to provide new results. But there are complex to built on the grid and to interface with the different components and services. For this way of accessing the grid, developpers are also looking for standard APIs in a tightly-coupled application, or Web services in a weakly-coupled or distributed application.
This session will review some of the mechanisms that are currently used, how those are accommodated on the EGEE infrastructure, and the status of some proposed standards.
