New Tools: GridScape - A Tool for Building Interactive and Dynamic Grid Testbed Web Portals

Rajkumar Buyya
The University of Melbourne

The notion of grid computing is gaining popularity as a realistic solution to many of our large-scale data storage and processing needs. Grids enable the sharing, selection and aggregation of resources geographically distributed across collaborative organizations. Increasingly, people are beginning to embrace grid computing, and thus are seeing the need to set up their own grids and grid testbeds. With that realization comes the need to have some means to view and monitor the status of the resources in these testbeds (eg. Web based Grid portal).

Generally developers invest a
substantial amount of time and effort developing custom monitoring software. To overcome that limitation, the Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne, Australia, has developed a tool - Gridscape. Gridscape enables the rapid creation of interactive and dynamic testbed portals without any programming effort. Gridscape primarily aims to provide a solution for those users who need to be able to create a grid testbed portal but do not necessarily have the time or resources to build a system of their own from scratch.

The key features of Gridscape are the following:

1. It supports the rapid creation of Grid testbed portals
2. It allows simple portal management and administration
3. It provides an interactive and dynamic portal
4. It provides a clear and user-friendly overall view of Grid testbed resources

Gridscape has already been used by a number of organisations to create their Grid testbed portals for visualizing and monitoring resources. They include the Australian Virtual Observatory and UK AstroGrid Collaboration, Belle Data Analysis Grid, and our own World-Wide Grid (WWG) testbed.

Figure 1: A Grid Portal created with GridScape

An index of sites currently using the Gridscape software can be accessed at the following address: http://previn.cs.mu.oz.au:8080/gridscape and the testbed portals can be browsed online.

The developers of Gridscape are Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya from the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

For further information or to download the "open source" Gridscape software, please visit the Gridbus and Gridscape project pages (see Resources).

Resource:

http://www.gridbus.org/

Gridbus project