Accessing Grid and Cloud Services Through a Scientific Web Portal

Abstract

Distributed Computing Infrastructures have dedicated mechanisms to provide user communities with computational environments. While in the last decade the Grid has demonstrated to be a powerful paradigm in supporting scientific research, the complexity of the user experience still limits its adoption by unskilled user communities. Command line interfaces, X.509 certificates, template customization for job submission and data access tools require end-users to dedicate significant learning effort and thus represent a barrier to access Grid computing facilities. In this paper, we present a Web portal that solves the aforementioned limitations by providing simplified access to Grid and Cloud computing services. The portal provides a set of interfaces that support federated authentication mechanisms, storage discovery and job description templates, enabling user communities to run specific use cases. We developed the portal framework within the Italian Grid Infrastructure where the major national user representatives drove its design, the implemented solutions and its validation by testing some specific use cases.