Scientific Gateways

Scientific gateways or portals will become more important moving into the EGI era. Consequently, NA4 wants to start a discussion on technologies with an eye towards adopting common tools. There will be a discussion of scientific portals at the EGEE'09 conference. In preparation for that event, we would like to collect a list of technical experts that have experience with various tools and their experience with those tools. In addition, we'd like to capture important use cases to understand the requirements for the tools and to discover any commonalities between disciplines.

Technical Experts

Please provide the names of technical experts that have experience with portal technologies within your discipline. Indicate what tools they have looked at and their impression of each tool.

Name	Contact email	Tools	Impressions
John Smith	example@exampleNOSPAMPLEASE.com	super portal	Have used this to implement a portal for widget research. Although the tool functions well once setup, it is extremely difficult to deploy. Use of grid certificates with the portal is limited.
Hugues Benoit-Cattin, Sorina Pop, Tristan Glatard	hugues.benoit-cattin@creatisNOSPAMPLEASE.insa-lyon.fr, sorina.pop@creatisNOSPAMPLEASE.insa-lyon.fr, tristan.glatard@creatisNOSPAMPLEASE.insa-lyon.fr	Simri Portal, Gate-Lab (VBrowser and Moteur based)	The Simri ‘home-made’ portal was developed at Creatis in Java and Php for the Simri application, an MRI simulator parallelized using MPI. The portal allows for easy job submission on both the EGEE grid and the local cluster, job monitoring, jobs history, results retrieval, classical user management. Use of individual grid certificates is not possible and maintenance cost is rather high. Gate-Lab is a user-friendly interface composed of a MOTEUR-based web server and a Java client using VBrowser as a GUI to the LFC. Gate-Lab is dedicated to the GATE application. Starting from a single user interaction which indicates the main simulation macro file, the Gate-Lab searches for and sends all the needed inputs to the grid. It then splits the simulation into sub-tasks that are submitted to the grid. It monitors the simulation until completion, retrieves and merges the outputs into a location accessible with a simple web URL and keeps track of the simulations history. Authentication is based on individual grid certificates.

Use Cases

Please draft concise descriptions of use cases for the portal within your discipline and link those descriptions from this page. Be sure to identify the scientific discipline and intended users for each case.

Our scientific discipline at Creatis-LRMN in Lyon is medical imaging and targeted users are researchers and physicians with no specific grid knowledge. Main requirements are: user-friendly GUI, job submission and monitoring, QOS, results retrieval, user space management (I/O data, job history), authentication and security, low maintenance cost.

-- CharlesLoomis - 30 Jul 2009