An extendable GRID application portal

Abstract

To attract users from a wide range of scientific areas it is important to provide a variety of ways to access the Lunarc resources. Providing good user interfaces for all categories of users is a key factor for a high use of resources. One way of doing this is by providing access to common applications through a web-based portal. Existing grid portals are often geared toward's providing access to the features of the middleware instead of providing interfaces to existing applications. Lunarc has adopted a more application oriented approach providing dedicated user interfaces for each application using the grid middleware as an infrastructure for the implementation. The users as application experts can extend the portal themselves using an easy to use software development kit (SDK) for plugins. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.