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 tools for the interaction with the grid itself, but also for running complex applications involving for example large bulk jobs, application services and their mixture. 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 and graphical environments to interact to the Grid. 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 and end user environment implementations available and working with gLite.
The section includes four presentations from developers of high level EGEE user environments. WS-PGRADE โ to be introduced in the first presentation โ is an IDE-like portal to develop grid workflows, parameter studies and other types of complex grid applications, and also to share those structures with end users as โinvokableโ services. The second presentation shows a technical solution to authenticate grid end users in grid systems using smart cards. Smart cards are used by several companies and also in some countries to identify staff and citizens. Allowing the smart cards to be use in the grid for user authentication would eliminate the sometimes cumbersome X.509 certificates from the loop and would certainly give a boost to the take up of grid technologies by the larger public. The third talk introduces Migrating Desktop, a rich client environment that can extend usersโ workspaces with grid middleware services and high level grid application services. Recognizing the general usefulness of the tool, Migrating Desktop has recently became part of the EGEE RESPECT program. The last talk of the session introduces the latest results of the Grid2Win project which aims to integrate Windows based clusters into the computing services of the EGEE grid.
