A portal interface to my Grid workflow technology Stefan Rennick Egglestone University of Nottingham

Introduction The my Grid project - developing middleware to support in silico experiments in biology. Interface development has been undertaken hand-in-hand with middleware development. We have recently begun using portal technology to provide really simple interfaces to our middleware.

Structure of talk Describe the context for portal work and the decisions we have made about our web-portal design. Screenshots to demonstrate use of my Grid portal. Describe status of software and future problems that must be solved. Can demonstrate portal to anyone who is interested.

Workflow introduction One focus of middleware development has been on workflow technology. Taverna workflow workbench provides an interface to this middleware. Taverna is being used by a growing number of biologists and bioinformaticians.

Taverna…

Workflow problems Many available services are not designed for easy composability. Workflows which automate complex problems can themselves become very complex. As a result, a minority of biologists are likely to construct workflows. However, a constructed workflow may be useful to a much larger group of users.

Current workflow use Expert users construct workflows, save to disk and distribute to less expert users via . These users use workflows, generating (hopefully useful) results. These results may be shared with other users via . Problems – versioning, security, data management …

Portal justification Demand from users for a web-interface to myGrid workflow enactment technology. As a result, have developed my Grid Portal Interface (MPI). This supports –Workflow storage –Workflow enactment –Storage of data produced by enactment –Browsing of data produced by enactment

Technical details A set of portlets which have been designed to be compliant with JSR-168. Have deployed and tested in Gridsphere. Uses storage facilities provided by myGrid Information Repository (MIR). Portlets protected by portal login system. All users in one installation have shared access to data stored in that installation. Will now do demo of portal software.

Step 1 – user logon

Step 2 – collection management

Step 3 – workflow upload

Step 4 – start workflow enactment

Step 5 – monitor enactment progress

Step 6 – browse completed enactments

Step 7 – browse summary for enactment

Step 8 – browse individual enactment result

Software status Code freely available from my Grid CVS (but no release yet). Interface design stable. Some bugs in code that stores workflow results means MPI not yet ready for release. Hopefully it will be soon!

Interesting problems to solve How do we cache data fetched from remote storage? Should we provide more sophisticated data sharing facilities? Workflow data can be complex – is a web- interface the right way of presenting it?

Further information Me – (but I don’t work on the project my Grid mailing lists