HPC‐Europa single point of access as a framework for building science gateways

Abstract

AbstractOne of the goals of the HPC‐Europa project is to provide users with a single point of access (SPA) to the resources of HPC centers in Europe. To this end, the HPC‐Europa portal is being built to provide transparent, uniform, flexible and intuitive user access to HPC‐Europa resources. This portal will hide the underlying complexity and heterogeneity of these resources and the services that provide access to them. Since the computational environment of HPC‐Europa is strongly heterogeneous, even in terms of the deployed Grid middleware, we need a mechanism that maps a uniform graphical user interface to the functionality provided by services available in the institutions belonging to the HPC‐Europa consortium. In addition, accounting information has to be stored and provided on demand for both limiting resource usage and charging purposes in the HPC‐Europa infrastructure. The important goal of the SPA is also to provide the means to support user access to specific applications. This should make access to Grid infrastructures easier for end‐users. Both mechanisms (generic and application‐specific interfaces), along with additional tools, will combine to provide flexible and efficient software for building science gateways for researchers in various domains. In this paper, we describe the architecture of the SPA, which is based on the GridSphere portal framework. We present a mechanism for enabling end‐users to transparently access services available in the HPC‐Europa environment. The uniform job submission interface that uses this mechanism and is based on the Job Specification Description Language (JSDL) is presented. The mechanism supporting development of application‐specific user interfaces is also described. Finally, we discuss relevant issues and interoperability problems connected with the development of the SPA, in particular those concerning job submission, security and accounting. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.