GridSphere Status Update
Jason Novotny
novotny@aei.mpg.de
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jason Novotny, Michael Russell, Oliver Wehrens
The GridSphere Project
www.gridsphere.org
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GridSphere Status
Who we are ;-)
What have we done
What are we doing now
Where we are going
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The GridSphere Project
The primary goal of the GridSphere Project is to
develop a Grid portal framework that we call
GridSphere.
GridSphere is a JSR-168 compliant portlet container
that offers a set of core portlets that provide the
base functionality we think is required for all Web
portals.
GridSphere also provides a framework for developing
and packaging portlets as well as additional libraries
to make portlet development easier
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The GridSphere Portal
Overall goal to build the best open source standards
compliant portal designed to meet the needs of the
Grid community
Originally funded by the EU GridLab project spanning
3 years since 2002
Bringing together best of breed technologies in both
web and grid technologies
Building a community of users and developers and
continuing to add new exciting scenarios
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www.gridsphere.org
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GridSphere 2.0 Feature List
Portlet API passed Sun TCK and is 100% JSR 168 compliant
Additional Portlet API implementation nearly fully compatible with
IBM's WebSphere 4.2.
Support for the easy development and integration of new portlet
applications
Higher-level model for building complex portlets using visual beans
and the GridSphere User Interface (UI) tag library.
Flexible XML based portal presentation description can be easily
modified to create customized portal layouts.
Built-in support for Role Based Access Control (RBAC) separating
users into guests, users, admins and super users.
Sophisticated portlet service model that allows for creation and
reusability of new business logic with support for persistence of data
Jason Novotny
GridSphere 2.0 Feature List ...
Persistence of data provided using Hibernate OQL for database
support
Integrated Junit/Cactus unit tests for complete server side testing of
portlet services including the generation of test reports.
GridSphere core portlets:
Login, Logout, Locale settings
Profile personalization and Layout customization
Administration portlets for creation of users, groups, portlet
management and portal layout customization
Localization support in the Portlet API implementation and portlets
support French, English, German, Czech, Polish, Hungarian and
Italian. And now Arabic and Chinese
Open-source and 100% free! :-)
Jason Novotny
GridSphere’s Grid Portlets
The GridSphere portlet container is designed to be
web application independent. Indeed, one of the key
advantages of the Portlet API is the reuse of web
applications.
Thus, the GridSphere portlet container does not
contain any support for using Grid technologies.
Instead, GridSphere’s Grid related functionality is
contained in a web application we call Grid Portlets.
Grid Portlets, together with the GridSphere portlet
container, offers a generic Grid portal and can be
used to develop application-specific Grid portal
applications.
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How it all started….
Think back to 2002…
Early Grid Portal projects: Grid Portal Development Kit, HotPage,
Astrophysics Simulation Collaboratory
GPDK and HotPage received significant attention as early interfaces
to the Grid
Introducing Web Portals and portlet concept
Jetspeed 1 early portal demonstrating power and concept of portlets
Commercial application vendors providing in-house portlet-like
solutions
No real standards and landscape was quickly evolving….
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A few key milestones
Spring 2002: Completed design document and analysis of
existing portal / grid solutions
August 2002: Wrote the first line of code
December 2002: Functional portal prototype using Portlet API
borrowed from WebSphere API
2003: GridSphere evolves into highly functional portal complete
with core set of portlets, sophisticated service model and visual
tag library
August 2003: !st Portals & Portlets Workshop UK
January 2004: JSR 168 Portlet API implementation
February 2004: GS appears in IBM developerWorks article
March 2004: GS passes Sun Technology Compatibility Kit
November 2004: OGCE is JSR compliant and can be dropped
into GridSphere portal demonstrating true interoperability!
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Progression of Code
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Where are we at?
A primary goal has been to engage global community
GGF hosted GridSphere tutorials Oct. 2004
Upcoming UK workshop March 3/4
Thousands of downloads all over the world since March 2004
80% commercial / 20% academic
Adopt standard / open source engineering practices
Mail lists (over 165 users subscribed)
CVS
Bug tracker bugs.gridsphere.org
GridSphere 2.0.2 in maintenance mode
New features continuing to be added as
needs/requests arise
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Download Statistics
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Ongoing Collaborations
Cactus portal at Albert Einstein Institute
Interface to Cactus numerical relativity application / provide
physicists with interface for launching jobs & viewing results
Grid Portal at Canadian National Research Council
Provide controlled remote access to NMR spectroscopy
instruments
GEON earth sciences portal / CHRONOS portal
Manage/visualize/analyze vast amount of geoscience data and
large scale databases
Pgrade portal at SZTAKI Hungary & Univ.
Westminster UK
Creation, execution and monitoring of complex workflows
Many, many more…
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Future Looks Bright
GridSphere adopted by countless academic and commercial
projects
Seeking collaborations & funding to continue to apply our
knowledge in portals and grid technologies
GS supported under D-Grid (German Grid) initiative
GS adopted under HPC Europa project
Continue to focus on standards /emerging technologies
WSRP integration planned for March at UK workshop
JSF already supported (one of the first to do so)
Content management and repository standards JSR 170 / Jakarta Slide
Business Process Management (Grid?)
Focus on sharing solutions
Delivering truly usable end-user environments!
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