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Grid Portal Development Kit (GPDK) |
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| The GPDK is not currently being supported anymore! |
One of the most exciting areas of Grid application development is the construction of portals to allow computational scientists, researchers and high performance computer/application users access to resources via an easy to use web page interface. The goal is to develop common components that can be used by portal developers to build a website that can securely authenticate users to remote resources and help them make better decisions for scheduling jobs by allowing them to view pertinent resource information obtained and stored on a remote database. In addition, profiles are created and stored for portal users allowing them to track and monitor jobs submitted and view results.
The Grid Portal Development Kit provides both a portal development environment for the creation of new portals as well as a collection of Grid service beans used to accomplish basic operations such as job submission, file transfer and querying of information services.
The envisoned portal architecture is a standard three tier model, where a client browser securely communicates to a web server over an https connection. The web server is capable of accessing various Grid services using the Globus infrastructure. The Globus toolkit provides mechanisms for securely submitting jobs to a Globus gatekeeper, querying for hardware/software information using LDAP, and a secure PKI infrastructure using GSI.
By taking advantage of the Myproxy package , also distributed as part of the Grid Portal Collaboration, users can use the portal to gain access to remote resources from anywhere without requiring their certificate and private key be located on the same machine/device running a web browser. The Myproxy server is responsible for maintaing user's delegated credentials, proxies, that can be securely retrieved by a portal for later use.
The Grid Portal Development Kit is designed to provide access to Grid services by using Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Beans using Tomcat, an open source web application server developed by Sun microsystems as the latest reference implementation of Java Servlets v2.2 and Java Server Pages v1.1. Tomcat can be easily configured to work with an existing web server e.g. Apache, Microsoft IIS, or Netscape as well as its own simple web server that can be used for development purposes. The GPDK is packaged as a web application as defined by the Java Servlet 2.2 specification, consisting of web pages (HTML), Java server pages (JSP), and Java beans. A web application can be easily packaged and deployed as a Web application ARchive (WAR) file similar to a Java ARchive file containing Java classes.
The GPDK Java beans derive most of their functionality from the Globus Java Commodity Grid (CoG) toolkit. CoG provides a Globus API in pure Java including the GSI using the IAIK Java SSL libraries to delegate credentials. The CoG kit provides API's for submitting jobs to Globus gatekeepers, transferring files using GSIFTP implemented in Java and querying LDAP servers using the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). GPDK Java beans merely present an easier interface for web developers to use the CoG kit when developing portal server pages.
GPDK Java Beans are grouped into the following five categories, discussed below: Security, User Profiles, Job Submission, File Transfer and Information Services.
The sole security bean, MyproxyBean, is responsible for obtaining a delegated credential from a valid Myproxy server. The MyproxyBean has a few simple methods for setting the username, password, and designated lifetime of the proxy on the web server. In addition, the MyproxyBean also allows delegated credentials to be uploaded securely to the web server.
User profiles are controlled by three User Beans: UserLoginBean, UserAdminBean and the UserProfileBean. The UserLoginBean provides an optional service to authorize users to a portal. Currently, it only sets a username and password and checks a password file on the webserver to validate access. The UserAdminBean provides methods for serializing a UserProfileBean and validating a user's profile that is password protected. In the future, the UserAdminBean will securely store user profiles to a remote database, LDAP or DBMS. The UserProfileBean maintains user information including preferences, credential information, submitted job history, computational resources etc. The UserProfileBean is generally instantiated with session scope to persist for the duration of the user's transactions on the portal.
The JobBean is a very simple bean that contains all the necessary properties used in submitting a job including memory requirements, name of executble, arguments, number of processors, maximum wall clock or cpu time, queue to submit to, etc. A JobBean is passed to a JobSubmissionBean that is responsible for actually launching the job. Two varieties of the JobSubmissionBean currently exist. The GramSubmissionBean will submit a job to a Globus gatekeeper that can run either interactively or to a scheduling system if one exists. The GSISSHSubmissionBean is supported for hosts that have installed GSISSH and is used to submit interactive jobs. After a job is sumitted, a JobInfoBean can be retrieved that contains various submit information including timestamp of job submitted, a Job ID that can be used to identify an active job, the status of the job, job output, etc. The JobHistoryBean is intended to store multiple JobInfo beans providing a history of information from jobs that have been submitted and can be stored in the user's profile.
Currently, the ability to transfer files is provided by the FileTransferBean interface. Both GSIFTPTranferBean and the GSISCPTransferBean securely copy files from source to destination hosts using the user's delegated credential. The GSISCPTransferBean requires that GSISSH be deployed on machines to which file transfer via GSI enhanced scp is desired. The GSIFTPTransferBean implements a GSI enhanced FTP in pure Java and is also capable of third-party file transfers.
The MDSQueryBean provides methods for querying an LDAP server by setting and retrieving object classes and attributes such as operating system type, memory, cpu load for various resources. Currently, the MDSQueryBean takes advantage of the Mozilla Directory SDK for communicating LDAP and creating an MDSPool which maintains a pool of open LDAP connections.
The latest release of the GPDK is accessible off CVS. To download a copy of the latest version issue the following:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@portnoyc.lbl.gov:/home/g5/repository login
(hit return)
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@portnoyc.lbl.gov:/home/g5/repository co gpdk
Please contact me if you decide to use GPDK. In addition, please subscribe to the extreme-portals mailing list for cvs updates and other GPDK information.
GPDK paper to appear in upcoming Concurrency paper
GPDK developer tutorial slides were presented at the Grid Portal Developer Workshop