4th EGEE User Forum/OGF 25 and OGF Europe's 2nd International Event

Robot Certificates and VisualGrid with GENIUS Grid Portal

3 Mar 2009, 19:36

12m

Foyer (Le Ciminiere, Catania, Sicily, Italy)

Demo End-user environments and portal technologies Demo Session

Speaker

Dr Giuseppe La Rocca (GILDA)

Description

Remote access to computing services creates new opportunities for researchers to bring existing applications to higher levels of usability and performance. Unfortunately the know-how necessary to access these modern e-Infrastructure is not trivial. Grid portals and robot certificates can simplify the grid access especially for non-expert users. Moreover, many grid applications produce images that can be collected and encoded as a unique video using the on-line streaming tool embedded in the portal at run time.

Keywords

Grid Computing, portals, robot certificates, video streaming, job monitoring, Job Submission Tool

Justification for delivering demo and technical requirements (ONLY for demonstrations)

Network connectivity, a video projector and a public IP address are needed for the live demo.

Impact

The GENIUS portal has been successfully used to run different scientific and commercial applications on Grid. An important class of them, especially those producing complex output patterns after a long run, can be better monitored using the VisualGrid online streaming tool deployed with the portal. This feature is maybe helpful for both demonstration purposes and job control. With this tool the result of Grid calculation can be easily shown with the strong impact of multimedia communication to a wide audience. For instance, Fluent results become easily clear and comprehensible. Another notable feature introduced into GENIUS is the robot certificates. After the user has logged into the portal, a proxy certificate is generated by using the robot certificate and the user is automatically redirected to the home page of the application closely related to this certificate. This feature has been adopted to set up a distributed grid infrastructure to run a bioinformatics application.

URL for further information

http://www.fluent.com
https://gilda.ct.infn.it/Bari/LAROCCA_MrBayes_AVI.avi
https://infn-ui-01.ct.pi2s2.it

Conclusions and Future Work

The valuable benefits introduced by robot certificates and the on-line streaming tool, can really contribute to make Grid technology more appealing, and provide an asset in raising Grid awareness to a larger number of potential users.

Detailed analysis

In order to foster the exploitation of Grid technologies, the EnginFrame Java framework, has been extended to support robot certificates which can be installed on a smart card and used by everyone interested in running the related Grid applications. The proxy certificate, signed with the robot certificate, will be used by the Genius portal to allow user accesses in a way much similar to the web.
Moreover the portal exposes a post-processing tool for job monitoring (VisualGrid). The deployed service allows to generate a video output starting from the images generated by a producer application. As video streaming can be simultaneous to the run of the producer job, the user can follow almost live its evolution.