COMPUTATIONAL METHODS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 13(2), 131-141 (2007)



Accessing Grid Computing Resources
with g-Eclipse Platform

Paweł Wolniewicz1, Norbert Meyer1, Maciej Stroiński1, Mathias Stuempert2
Harald Kornmayer3, Martin Polak4, Harald Gjermundrød5


1Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center
ul. Noskowskiego 10, 61-704 Poznań, Poland
e-mail: {pawel.wolniewicz/ meyer/stroinsk}@man.poznan.pl
2Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe
Postfach 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe, Germany
e-mail: mathias.stuempert@iwr.fzk.de
3NEC Laboratories Europe, IT Research Division
Rathausallee 10, D-53757 St. Augustin, Germany
e-mail: harald.kornmayer@it.neclab.eu
4Institute for Graphics and Parallel Computing (GUP) University Linz
Altenbergerstraße 69, A-4040 Linz, Austria
e-mail: mpolak@gup.jku.at
5University of Cyprus
PO Box 20537, 75 Kallipoleos Str., 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus
e-mail: harald@cs.ucy.ac.cy


(Rec: December 7, 2007)

Abstract: In the paper we present how g-Eclipse can be used for easy running computation on Grid resources. The g-Eclipse project is
an EU-founded project that aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The
g-Eclipse framework provides a general, integrated workbench toolset for Grid users, operators and developers. It is very useful for
inexperienced users to interact with Grid resources independently of the underlying Grid middleware. The Grid abstraction enables Grid
users to access the Grid in a desktop-like manner with wizards specified for common use cases.
Keywords: Grid, Eclipse, g-Eclipse, user interface, grid tool, middleware independent



I. INTRODUCTION

The growing computational requirements for modern
applications are approching the limit where it very often
cannot be fulfilled by a single organization. In Europe there
are numerous Grid projects focusing on different ap-
plications, communities and technologies. The majority of
the efforts were put on the preparation of working Grid
infrastructure; implying simplicity and user friendliness
were not the priority. As a result, Grids were not widely
accepted, because the command line interface to the Grid
required some knowledge about the underlying Grid
mechanisms. It was not a problem in the beginning of the
Grid era when most users of the Grid were involved in its
creation and configuration. The Grid proved its usefulness
for many application areas and the number of potential
users is increasing rapidly. To support new, inexperienced
users, user-friendly interfaces to the Grid are required.
The most popular Grid infrastructure in Europe is
EGEE [1], which brings together scientists and engineers
from more than 240 institutions in 45 countries world-wide
to provide a seamless Grid infrastructure for e-Science that
is available to scientists 24 hours-a-day. EGEE is using
gLite middleware which provides a bleeding-edge, best-of-
breed framework for building Grid applications tapping
into the power of distributed computing and storage
resources across the Internet. The most popular way of
using gLite [2] middleware is to use command lines from
the dedicated access machine. This way of using Grid is
not simple and some effort was put to prepare the Genius
Grid portal [3]. Other projects like GridLab [4], Deisa [5],
UNICORE [6] also started with command line interfaces
and in the later phase Grid portals were prepared.
Currently, portals tend to be the standard way of ac-
cessing Grid resources. However, usually they are targeted
to the specific Grid infrastructure or even the specific Grid

P. Wolniewicz et al. 132
application. To simplify the process of preparing portals for
specific usage (e.g. for specific scientific community),
some portal development kits vere devised, like GridSphere
[7]. Using the same portal technology has a positive effect
that many portals have similar user interface and users do
not need to learn it when they start to use new portal.
Recently some effort was put to specify a standard for
building the Grid portals.
g-Eclipse is more than a tool for accessing Grid and has
much more functionality that those provided by Grid
portals. g-Eclipse is an integrated Grid environment for
Grid users, Grid operators, and Grid developers. In the later
part of the paper we present the general overview of g-Ec-
lipse and its architecture. We focus on g-Eclipse parts re-
lated to Grid computing, which is accessing Grid resources
and developing Grid applications.


II. g-ECLIPSE OVERVIEW

The g-Eclipse is an integrated workbench framework to
access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The frame-
work is built on top of the reliable eco-system of the
Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development
and to benefit from synergy effects arising from the use of
the widely spread Eclipse [8] platform. The product allows
to access Grid resources, to manage Grid resources and to
support the development cycle of new Grid applications.
The g-Eclipse framework is based on a middleware-
-independent model and provides a graphical user interface
build upon this model. By extensively using the Eclipse ex-
tension mechanism in combination with object-oriented de-
sign patterns, the framework can be easily extended by
middleware-specific implementations. The result of this
approach is a common user interface for all potential mid-
dleware in order to lower the threshold for scientific and
industrial applications to be used on a Grid.
In its first project year, g-Eclipse provided the middle-
ware-independent architecture and an exemplary imple-
mentation for the gLite middleware based on it. This im-
plementation directly enables the use of already existing
large Grid infrastructures such as EGEE or int.eu.grid. In
the second project year another implementation of this ar-
chitecture for the GRIA [9] middleware will be provided in
order to prove the middleware-independent concept of the
g-Eclipse model.
The g-Eclipse project directly supports three different
user roles, Grid application users, Grid operators and Grid
application developers. Grid application users are able to
access the Grid with standardized but customizable user-
friendly interfaces. Grid operators can reduce the cost of
operation as the complexity of the Grid will be reduced
with the supporting tools. Grid application developers are
empowered to speed up the development cycle of new Grid
applications. g-Eclipse tools are organized in so called
perspectives, and the three provided perspectives corres-
pond to the three Grid roles. Each perspective contains
a predefined set of tools, but can be customised for specific
users’ needs.
In the context of Grid computing it seems probable that
the majority of end-users will use g-Eclipse as a graphical
tool within the Eclipse workbench. These users only get in
direct contact with the UI contributions of g-Eclipse that
hides the complexity of subjacent core features. Therefore,
g-Eclipse provides a reliable and intuitive graphical inter-
face that is conformant to the Eclipse user interface
guidelines. The second group of end-users may use g-Ec-
lipse as a framework in the sense of an API. They want to
create their own applications based on the core functional-
ities rather than on the UI components. For g-Eclipse it
means that we have to design a sophisticated, but at the
same time manageable, API.
g-Eclipse is build on the Eclipse Platform, which is
probably the most successful integration platform currently
available. The development of Eclipse was started by IBM
in the late 1990s and then handed over to the nonprofit
Eclipse Foundation [8], to be managed as an open-source
platform. Its design follows the standards set by the Object
Management Group [10] that supports the interoperability
between enterprise applications. The Eclipse platform is
freely licensed and open source. The power of Eclipse lies
in the common platform that it provides into which differ-
ent multi-vendor tools can be integrated. Eclipse was de-
signed for extensions from the very beginning and all
Eclipse components and plug-ins are built for re-use. Any-
one can write plug-ins for Eclipse and can have them work
directly with any other plug-in for the platform. Eclipse’s
success is attributable to this capability and to the Eclipse
open-source license, which allows developers to have easy
and free-of-charge access to the source code. This will al-
low them to modify it and innovate quickly to meet user
needs. Eclipse is also experiencing strong adoption in the
research area as an ideal platform for research, as it allows
the user to concentrate on the research subject, instead of
creating the basic infrastructure. The rich set of open
source extensions (>500 at the time of writing) available
from the Eclipse community can provide an additional
benefit to research projects. With all these features, Eclipse
is a perfect base on which to build an integrated Grid envi-
ronment.
The most popular usage of Eclipse is Java and C++ In-
tegrated Development Environment. It is commonly used
by programmers around the world. But Eclipse is used as
integration platform also for many other products like
personal information managers, stock exchange analysis
and other. A lot of plug-ins are available for Eclipse and
they can be installed individually depending on users’
needs. Example plug-ins include collaboration tools, de-
velopment support tools, mail clients and many other.
Eclipse-based products are already used by many people,
and installing g-Eclipse is just updating the current
Eclipse with g-Eclipse plug-ins by pointing the Eclipse
Update Manager to g-Eclipse update site. As g-Eclipse
keeps the Eclipse style and look-and-feel, working with