1. Metadata-rich Service Oriented Grid Portals
Mehmet Nacar

2. Outline Research Objectives Background Grid portals Research issues
Architecture
Contributions
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

3. Research Objectives I Improve ease of Grid portal development
We will research problems in federating multiple portal instances
Integrating portals based on the same code (e.g. all GridSphere)
Integrating portals with different code bases
Integrating portals with non-portal services
identity management
authorization
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

4. Research Objectives II
We will investigate problems turning portals into Grid Web services
It is the right architecture especially for Grid services
WSRP is the Web Service standard
WSRP must be coupled to other Web service standards for addressing and reliability
This will require an examination and implementation of SOAP handlers
Since user sessions expire, but grid jobs may still running at the backend.
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

5. What is a portal? Web based application provides
Personalization, single sign on and content aggregation
Web, science and educational portal
Yahoo, Google
CIMA, VLAB and LEAD
OneStart and Oncourse
Portal vs. portal framework
Jetspeed, GridSphere and Sakai frameworks
Modern portal framework vs. traditional portals
Jetspeed, GridSphere and uPortal
CGI-based portals, ReciprocalNet
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

6. Yahoo portal December 2, 2018 Mehmet Nacar
Google portal snapshot replaces with portal skeleton page
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

7. Portal page
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

8. Portlets What is a portlet? Portlet examples Portlet container
Building blocks of portals
Portlet examples
Calendar, chat, file transfer, weather and news.
We have developed Grid portlets for OGCE
Myproxy, job submission and GridFtp.
Portlet container
Provides lifecycle management of portlets
Defines window states and portlet modes
Equips packaging and deployment
JSR 168 specification defines
Portlet API
Brings standard to deploy portlets within various portals
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

9. Portal framework Portal framework aggregates portlet contents
Portal services are portal capabilities
Portal services are evaluated in different aspects:
Administrative services
Account management, portlet management
User management services
User profile, layout management
There are also related portlets
Administrative portlets are account creation, portlet registry
User portlets are file transfer and calendar
Portal front page displays anonymous content with login portlet
What services involves when a user logs into the portal
Login service  Authorization Service  Layout Service
Picture of portal containers and portal frameworks run on tomcat servlet engine.
Show portal services interaction in between portal container and portal framework
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

10. Problem statement
Portals and portlets are standardized but this opens new problem areas, particularly for Grid portals
Federating multiple portal instances built from JSR 168 compatible frameworks.
We must decouple portal “capabilities” from the container and make them into interoperable Web services.
Examples include identity management, authorization and logging.
Portlets and portals themselves can become Web services that can be federated.
But we must show these can be combined with other Web service registration, discovery, reliability, and others.
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

11. Grid portals What makes a portal Grid-enabled?
Portlets provide access to Grid services
Portal server leverage Grid credentials to access Grid services
Provide capabilities/portlets
GridFTP, job submission and job monitoring
What tools and services are available to build Grid portals?
Java COG: Grid client programming API
MyProxy: credential management service
OGCE: collection of portlets and tools for building portlets
GAMA and PURSe: integrated Grid account management
We will examine two motivating examples
VLAB: traditional job submission portal for computational chemistry
CIMA: scientific instrument and data portal
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

12. VLAB Portal
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

13. VLAB: The Virtual Laboratory for Earth and Planetary Materials
Primarily a traditional job submission, monitoring, and management portal.
Collaborative Grid services and portals support computational material science.
Component based Grid portlet development makes application development easier.
VLAB Challenges:
Grid Portlets must be easy to develop using component libraries.
HTML <form> actions in Grid portals typically have several steps:
Stage data files in and out of the desired remote host.
Run one or more executables.
Keep track of job progress
Store all of the information as “job pedigree” for reproducibility.
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

14. Research issue: Grid components
Grid portlet applications require dynamic interaction and fine-grained components.
Portlets themselves need to be built out of components
Grid services mostly use request/response paradigm
Grid portlets use web forms heavily
Compared to wikis, blogs, RSS-driven news portals, which have a different problem of content management.
Grid widgets can provide components for:
Proxy credential
GridFtp operations
Job submissions, multi-staged jobs
Using widgets as tag libraries help to encapsulate reusable Grid components
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

15. Grid Tag Libraries
Grid tag libraries use the Java COG Kit abstractions
Grid tags simplify association of composite Grid actions
And increase reuse of code
There are associated custom JSF tag extensions we’ve developed:
<o:proxy/>, <o:task/>, <o:taskGraph/>, <o:taskAdd/> and <o:contextStore/>
Taskgraph supports multi-staged jobs
<f:verbatim>
<o:taskGraph id="myGraph" method="#{taskgraph.test}" binding="#{taskgraph.taskgr}" >
<o:proxy id=“myproxy" method=“#{proxy.create}" />
<o:task id="task1" method="#{task.create}" type="FileTransferInput" />
<o:task id="task2" method="#{task.create}" type="JobSubmit" />
<o:task id="task3" method="#{task.create}" type="FileTransferOutput" />
<o:taskAdd id="taskadd1" name="task1" depends="task2" method="taskgraph.add" />
<o:taskAdd id="taskadd1" name="task2" depends="task3" method="taskgraph.add" />
</o:taskGraph>
</f:verbatim>
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

16. CIMA Crystallography portal
CIMA picture snapshot
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

17. CIMA (Common Instrument Middleware Architecture)
Primarily a data portal to online instruments
Crystallographers collect data in participating laboratories and collaborate on samples.
Portlets have to access data with group privileges.
Explain cima use case, with problems?
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

18. Research issue: federating portal instances
CIMA and LSST Dark Energy Survey portal presents this problem:
Multiple CIMA portal deployment instances are associated with different labs (IUMSC, Purdue, University of Sydney etc)
Need to solve problem of portal identity federation.
Recall identity management is key portal capability.
Other problems (such as federated authorization) flow from this.
Portal frameworks like GridSphere, uPortal and Jetspeed only support local “capabilities”. This approach has drawbacks:
Portal services tightly coupled to portal container and cannot being reused.
Portal frameworks have proprietary services.
Authorization capabilities of the portals define access rights for portlets not for contents
These “capabilities” should be full-fledged Web services
This architecture greatly simplifies the federation problem
Some portals have useful services, but the others doesn’t support these features.
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

19. Federating multiple portals I
Requirements
Browser-based login is required for portals
Each site maintains its own portal server
Single sign on across the portal servers
Federation can be done providing:
Several portals have the same code base but run different instances
Integrating portals with different code bases
Integrating portals with non-portal services, which have identity and authorization that is external to the portal framework.
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

20. Federating multiple portals II
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

21. Identity service Identity service issues security tokes for users
Identity service support interfaces including:
Issuing identity/security tokens
Authenticating security tokens for redirection
Interfaces for administrative tasks including:
Adding, removing, editing users
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

22. Federating multiple portals III
This the case of federation autonomous portals. Current portal frameworks has own services.
Identity service can provide browser based federation or SSO
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

23. Integrating portals with services
Mediator is a Web service
Administration of Web services through portal
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

24. How WSRP fits into this architecture?
Handles Grid job management problems
WSRP provides Grid Web services
Federated portals are autonomous
Identity service provides federation
Check identity token whether it is logged in or not.
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

25. Implications
Provides standard way for portals to use external services
Coordination of portal services is handled outside of portal framework
More services can be added dynamically
Service interfaces are extensible
New features can be added to services
Enables lightweight portal frameworks (minimum local capabilities)
Migration of portlets and services between portal frameworks will be easier
Administration of Web services through portal
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

26. Does this architecture scale well?
There will be some overhead
Local capabilities vs. services
In long term portal servers will be overloaded
The architecture turns out to be advantageous
Adaptable to for new features
Simplifies migration across portal frameworks
Services can be replicated
Identity service could run on several locations
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

27. Milestones
Implementation of identity, logging and authorization services using WS technologies.
Design of mediator service
Mediator needs to coordinate services
This will require the investigation of SOAP handlers and their proper pipelining.
Managing SOAP header processors rather than services.
Integration of reliable and secure WSRP requires two handlers
WS-RM reliability handler.
WS-Security handler
External portal services must provide distributed identity.
Getting sample data for providers in CIMA case requires:
Distributed identity service
Authorization service
Reliability service
Logging service
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar

28. Contributions of this thesis
Simplification of portlet development for Grid applications through reusable libraries.
Portlets are “coarse-grained” components.
Tag libraries for portlets are “fine-grained” components.
Design, development and validation of service-oriented portal architecture
Extends the current field
Limited by close coupling of portal core services to specific frameworks
Our approach provides a natural way to federate multiple portal instances and to integrate portal services with other Grid services.
We will examine the extremes of portal scalability in this approach.
This framework will be a demanding test of Web Service standards.
Requires integration of several Web services standards
Integration of several standards: registration, security, reliability and others.
SOAP header processing is done by intermediaries
Intermediary coordination is similar to but distinct from Web Service workflow standards such as BPEL.
Show telescoping portal picture. This is the logical extreme.
All of these make extensive use of SOAP headers
December 2, 2018
Mehmet Nacar