Portals @ Extreme! Lab

Projects

• WS-Messenger
• Application Factory
• Workflow Composer
• Registry Service
• Java SOAP - XSUL Web Services Library
• Firewall Tools
• C++ / Python Soap
• Capability-Based Authorization
• XDirectory Service
• Web Services Load Balancing - DEN
• LEAD Portlets
• Karma Provenance Service & Workflow Tracking

Collaborations

• Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE)
• LEAD Portal

Overview

The Extreme! Computing group is involved in several Grid Portal projects that aim to create problem solving environments that allow scientists to program, access and execute distributed Grid applications from a conventional Web Browser. In one class of Grid portals, which we will call science portals, scientific domain knowledge and tools are presented to the user in terms of the application science and not in terms of complex distributed computing protocols. The goal is to allow the scientist to focus completely on the science problem at hand by making the Grid a transparent extension of the their desktop computing environment. Another class of Grid portals, which we call user portals, provides the user with direct views of Grid resources and services. These portals require the user to have a greater understanding of Grid technology than application-oriented science portals, but they often form the foundation of these more advanced tools.

Main Contributions

• WS-Messenger is our implementation of web service eventing and wsnt. We use it to allow remote applications to send notification messages to each other.
• The Application Factory is a web service wrapper toolkit for exposing command-line based scientific applications as web services.
• The Workflow Composer is a drop-and-drag tool for composing workflows from web services.
• The Registry Service is used to as a registry for web services descriptions as well as information about LEAD data objects.
• The Firewall Tools is a service that helps you expose multiple webservices with a singleopen port in your firewall. it also allows clients behind firewalls to have a public mailbox so that they may recieve messages by polling.
• The C++ / Python Soap tools are fast, light c++ implementations that also support an easy to use python layer.
• The Capability-Based Authorization allow for a capability-based authorization framework for web services.
• The XDirectory Service is a simple database interface to a metadata directory. it has a easy to use portal interface.
• The DEN is load balancing framework for web services.
• The LEAD portlets are a collection of portlets designed to interface with the LEAD system and provide users with the ability to manage their data and workflows.
• The Karma provenance service collects provenance from scientific workflows, and allows querying and visualizing over them. The Workflow Tracking (aka Notifier) library is used to publish provenance activities from workflows and applications/services as notifications using WS-Messenger notification broker.