Design and Development of A Grid Portal

Abstract

The Grid has shifted its focus from the high performance aspects towards Virtual Organizations which provide flexible, secure, coordinated resources sharing among collections of individuals, institutions and resources. The world of Grid computing is so vast that it always poses constant challenges and high learning curves to researchers and scientists. An increased need for collaborative research, together with continuing advances in communication technology and computer hardware, has facilitated the development of distributed systems that can provide users access to geographically disperse computing resources that are administered in multiple computer domains. The term grid computing, or grids, is popularly used to refer to such distributed systems. To access Grid resources an interface is needed. Grid portals are an increasingly popular mechanism for creating such customizable, Web-based interfaces to Grid services and resources. A Grid portal is a Web-based gateway that provides seamless access to heterogeneous backend resources. The main objective of Grid Portals is to provision Grid-based backend resources in transparent way. Portals are gaining attention among programmers due to their ease in development, richness in functionality, customization of interface and pluggable architecture. A collaborative portal brings together various resources, applications and services under one roof and provides a single point of entry and access to the users. This Thesis addresses the requirements for building a high performance Grid Computing portal. It also presents a brief introduction of Grid Computing and analyzes and compares existing Grid Portal toolkits. A detailed description of design and development of a Grid Portal has been presented in this Thesis.