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The Grid Engine Portal solution is focused on providing access to applications that today are typically submitted as batch jobs, from a command line interface, and run for dozens of minutes, hours, or even days. Grid Engine Portal is not a solution for transaction-based computing with sub-second responses.
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Virtually any industry that uses HPTC applications can benefit from Grid Engine Portal. In addition to the traditional technical computing markets like the Government labs and Universities, Grid Engine Portal could also provide a solution for the following sectors:
- Manufacturing — Comprised of industries with vastly differing business and technical computing needs, the automotive, electronics, high-tech machinery, and aerospace sectors could each benefit from grid engine portal solutions covering areas ranging from mechanical computer-aided engineering (MCAE) to electronic design automation (EDA).
- Energy — Oil and gas exploration sectors can benefit from portal solutions that provide access to seismic analysis visualizations that are supplemented with data from other sources, such as satellite imaging and geographic information systems.
- Life Sciences — With bioinformatics playing an increasingly central role in new drug discovery and research, life sciences enterprises spanning biotechnology, agribusiness, and pharmaceuticals have a critical need for portal solutions that can help them better utilize the information that drives new product development.
- Financial and Business Analysis — Banking and investment companies are relying on HPTC applications for decision support, portfolio optimization, risk management, and other applications. Portal solutions are playing increasingly important roles in helping financial industry professionals select the right analysis options to sort and analyze the growing mass of data.
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Grid Engine Portal pays for itself by providing broader access to diverse user bases, so that large investments in computational resources can be leveraged across multiple internal and external organizations, and a broader array of compute-intensive problem sets.
- Grid Engine Portal makes HPTC applications far more accessible users, so they can concentrate on solving problems rather than locating data and analytic tools. Instead of raw coding, users can point and click on the appropriate tools and datasets. The portal interface eliminates the need for specialized computing knowledge, making HPTC applications available to much wider audiences of business analysts and researchers.
- Technical computing resources can be consolidated within an organization in order to avoid the budget dilution that inevitably arises when groups vie internally for the same limited capital funding.
- Sun ONE Grid Engine resource management software directly improves the utilization of expensive capital equipment to enable maximal capability.
- In addition to Grid Engine Portal, other corporate services can be provided via the same portal deployment, minimizing and consolidating investment in technology.
- Grid Engine Portal helps lower the cost of administration, including the cost of adding new applications.
- Because the superior delivery mechanism of the Grid Engine Portal can be used across different departments, your organization can effectively spread the benefits of portal computing across different workgroups and functions. For instance, business applications in your organization could share the same portal infrastructure and gain the same benefits.
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Sun's Grid Engine Portal provides high performance technical computing (HPTC) users with secure anytime, anywhere access to a single Web-based point of delivery for services, content, and complex applications — through a standard Internet browser and simple point-and-click interfaces. Authorized users can:
- Submit jobs remotely
- Manage job submission via forms (no UNIX skills necessary)
- Dynamically check on the status of jobs
- Receive email notification when jobs are complete
- Upload files with the click of a button
- Download/visualize output files remotely
- Easily share results with collaborators
- Quickly add new and legacy applications for remote use and sharing
- Make Grid Engine Portal resources available to other users without duplicating the investment.
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The Sun Grid Engine Portal browser interface includes a series of functional "channels" or menus that allow a user to easily submit a job, identify what data files go with the job, specify where output goes, etc.
These channels include:
- Job List Channel for submitting new jobs. Here, the user is prompted for the inputs required by the application for job submission. Then, these inputs submitted to the computing environment for processing in a manner that is transparent to the user. Each time the screen is refreshed, a dynamic query automatically scans whether the user has any jobs running, and reports on their status.
- Project List Channel — Here users can dynamically create projects and upload files (input, data, or documents) into the Grid Engine Portal. A project is a directory is associated with each application. By clicking on a project, the user can view (or download) the files associated with that project.
- Application List Channel. This includes separate views for users and administrators. The User view shows all the applications currently available to that user through the Grid Engine Portal. The System Administrator view shows all the applications currently available through the Grid Engine Portal and provides and easy to use interface to register new applications with the portal within minutes.
- Job Control Channel — This is the administrative channel that controls all users' jobs and provides an interface for system accounting information. This channel is restricted to authorized administrative users.
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Grid Engine Portal does not interfere with application performance because it runs on a separate server from the resources executing the job. That is, there are no job execution latencies introduced by the Grid Engine Portal, only Web page transmission latencies. Grid Engine Portal customers evaluating the solution are invited to test a live demo to experience Grid Engine Portal in action.
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Yes. While the Sun ONE Portal Server runs on Solaris servers, users can submit jobs to all platforms that are configured as Sun Grid Engine clients. Grid Engine currently has binaries available to support Linux, HP-UX, IBM-AIX, SGI-IRIX, and Compaq-Tru64, as well as Solaris.
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In its current form, Sun Grid Engine is required. However the Grid Engine Portal Glue (Java servlet) code can be modified to support other packages.
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Grid Engine Portal was designed to make it easy for customers to add applications. The solution was developed in anticipation of additions and changes at the customer site. Additional features can be added by modifying the Java servlet, which is a straightforward exercise for any Java Programmer. Additionally, the Sun ONE Portal Server offers the capability to add functionality and customization.
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Yes. Grid Engine Portal currently handles output from X-windows based applications, and graphics based on Java applets have also been tested in the portal. Accessing other types of graphics from within the portal would need to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
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Applications using X-windows as the mechanism for interaction are fully supported. Applications using other techniques for interaction must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. We have had success with testing applet-based interactive applications.
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Security was a main concern in developing the Grid Engine Portal solution. Web-based access security is provided by the Sun ONE Portal Server application, and is based on SSL. Computational security is determined by the UNIX security properties of the computational servers.
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Sun's Grid Engine Portal is provided through the company's iForce Initiative, in which Sun works with its best-in-class iForce partner community to deliver customer-driven solutions that solve business problems and help customers reduce risk and time-to-service. The iForce Initiative plays a key supporting role in Sun's HPTC solution strategy by providing a collaborative community for building and testing proven solutions on Sun technology platforms that leverage the expertise of Sun Professional Services and the iForce partner community. Other customers can build customized version of this solution by contacting their local sales representative. If you are interested in evaluating Grid Engine Portal, contact us at TCP@sun.com.
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Sun Microsystems, Inc. donated the Technical Computing Portal (TCP) solution to the Grid Engine open source project. The change in the name of this solution reflects its new status as a module in the Grid Engine open source project. The new name and home for GEP were influenced by its loose integration with Sun ONE Grid Engine's resource management capabilities.
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You must register for the Grid Engine project, which is a two step process:
- Register as a member of sunsource.net at
http://gridengine.sunsource.net
- After your membership in sunsource.net has been confirmed, login to sunsource.net at the URL above and then join the Grid Engine project by selecting the "Join as Project Member" link. Select the role of "Observer."
Once this process is completed, you can login to the Grid Engine site (http://gridengine.sunsource.net) and then select Grid Engine Portal under the Resources link in the left navigation bar.
The GEP page provides an overview of GEP's functionality, along with links to downloads, documentation and mailing lists. GEP is made available under the SISSL license, as is the rest of the project source code at this site.
See http://gridengine.sunsource.net/project/gridengine/license.html for more information.
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