Rob Allan Daresbury Laboratory A Web Portal for the National Grid Service Xiaobo Yang, Dharmesh Chohan, Xiao Dong Wang and Rob Allan CCLRC e-Science Centre, CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory Warrington WA4 4AD, UK

Presenter Name Facility Name NGSPortal v1.0 NGSPortal 1.0 was based on the Open Grid Computing Environment portal – Used the CHEF framework (Comprehensive Collaborative Framework) from U. Michigan Some ideas taken from HPCPortal and InfoPortal Tools available November 2004: –MyProxy management –GRAM job submission –FileTransfer based on GridFTP –MDS resource discovery Feedback at NeSC training event, December 2004

Presenter Name Facility Name NGSPortal v1.0 file-transfer tool

Presenter Name Facility Name Why change? Was always planned to migrate to Sakai along with OGCE v2.0 – –had letters of support from Brad Wheeler and Chuck Severance –JISC Sakai VRE Demonstrator funded But, OGCE is no longer using Sakai. Decided to deploy JSR-168 Java standard portlets to replace the CHEF teamlets GridSphere and uPortal frameworks now supported We also decided to use JSR-168 in NGSPortal v2.0 for complete portability and sharing with other projects such as Integrative Biology and e-HTPX GridSphere, uPortal, LifeRay, eXo Platform and StringBeans evaluated –workshop with Jason Novotny, NeSC, March 2005 –See separate talk StringBeans chosen because of its good level of support and flexibility of customisation

Presenter Name Facility Name Single Sign-On v1.0 is intended to work with Globus using a MyProxy certificate repository for pervasive access (PKI infrastructure) Same as HPCPortal and an established Grid security procedure 1.Log into portal with username/ passwd 2.Retrieve proxy credential from MyProxy using possibly a different username/ passwd –MyProxy is maintained by the Grid Operations and Support Centre for all Grid users myproxy.grid-support.ac.uk

Presenter Name Facility Name 2-step login method Simplified by using MyProxy as primary authentication via a CHEF service

Presenter Name Facility Name NGSPortal v2.0 Using JSR-168 Chose StringBeans r2.4 Portlets will also work in other environments, e.g. GridSphere Single Web application for all portals enables shared session information, e.g. proxy credential Using JAAS architecture for MyProxy Login Module –Map to local portal accounts –Still has a portal login for those who don’t want to use Grid services

Presenter Name Facility Name NGSPortal v2.0 “Welcome!”

Presenter Name Facility Name Authentication in NGSPortal v2.0

Presenter Name Facility Name Inter-portlet Communication using JMS Having all portlets in one Web application is not satisfactory –Configuration and management problems –Hard to distribute via a portlet repository Inter-portlet communication is provided in commercial portal frameworks, e.g. WebSphere –Extensions to JSR-168 JMS is used for the BatchJobMonitor portlet. –A finishing job sends a JMS message to a server –BatchJobMonitor can consume this message to get the job status –Can also provide notification

Presenter Name Facility Name BatchJobMonitor portlet

Presenter Name Facility Name Other Features of J2EE Architecture Current development is being doing using J2EE architectural features hosted in JBOSS JAAS and JMS are already part of J2EE EJB: Enterprise Java Beans enables further factoring of a multi-tier server-centric application such as a portal. EJBs can be automatically exposed as Web services

Presenter Name Facility Name Re-factoring using J2EE Architecture Business Logic Enterprise JavaBeans Web Service Interfaces JSR 168 Portlets Proxy Manager Job Submission File Transfer GridFTP/SRB LDAP Browser Sakai Framework Portal JSR 168 Compliant UDDI Registry EJB Internal Comm Accessing EJBsWeb Service Registry Accessing Web Services

Presenter Name Facility Name Future Work The current architecture is being re-factored as above Other portlets are being developed by popular demand, e.g. an SRB portlet Further integration of the portlets is taking place, e.g. using SRB together with GridFTP or closely coupled with the JobManager portlet Application-specific portlets such as DL_POLY Cloning of portlets for other projects such as Integrative Biology Portlet registry - jUDDI Workflow – WOSE project Chargeable services – GridMarkets project WSRP for aggregation of remote services and provision of NGS portlets to projects’ own portals WSRP export of portlets for Sakai VRE Demonstrator project * See other talks at this conference *