Usable grid infrastructures: practical experiences from the eMinerals project

Abstract

We report experiences from the eMinerals project, in collaboration with the National Institute for Environmental eScience, in developing a highly-usable grid infrastructure to support simulation sciences. The focus has been on a close integration between compute, data and collaborative components, with the aim to make each of these highly usable for the scientists. Here we describe both general aspects of our approach and specific details of our toolset. The latter include the overall grid infrastructure, the data grid, the user interface, the job submission process, tools for creating and managing combinatorial or parameter-sweep studies, our XML tools, and our metadata tools, together with their role in running jobs, managing and sharing both data and information, and in enabling informed collaboration between researchers.