Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN 47404, USA. Tel.: +1 812 855 8305; Fax: +1 812 855 4829;
E-mail: srikrish@cs.indiana.edu | National Center for Supercomputing Applications,
Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Tel.: +1 217 244 4696; Fax: +1 217 244 2909; E-mail:
jalameda@ncsa.uiuc.edu | Department of Chemical Engineering, University of
Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Tel.: +1 217 333 0063; Fax: +1 217 333 5052;
E-mail: r-alkire@uiuc.edu
Abstract: This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of the
XCAT Grid Science Portal. The portal lets grid application programmers script
complex distributed computations and package these applications with simple
interfaces for others to use. Each application is packaged as a notebook
which consists of web pages and editable parameterized scripts. The portal is a
workstation-based specialized personal web server, capable of executing
the application scripts and launching remote grid applications for the user.
The portal server can receive event streams published by the application and
grid resource information published by Network Weather Service (NWS) [35]
or Autopilot [16] sensors. Notebooks can be published and stored in
web based archives for others to retrieve and modify. The XCAT Grid Science
Portal has been tested with various applications, including the distributed
simulation of chemical processes in semiconductor manufacturing and
collaboratory support for X-ray crystallographers.
