Life Sciences Portal Activity
DEISA - Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (http://www.deisa.eu/) - is a consortium of the 11 leading European national supercomputing centres (IDRIS, CINECA, RZG, FZJ, SARA, EPCC, CSC, HLRS, LRZ, BSC and ECWMF). This consortium operates a persistent, production quality, distributed supercomputing environment – the DEISA Supercomputing Grid.
The DEISA consortium have developed, deployed and operated a Life Sciences Portal (LSP) [1] that was based on a proprietary portal framework, EnginFrame, (http://www.enginframe.com/) . This LSP requires EnginFrame’s own proprietary infra-structure for submitting jobs to the batch schedulers on DEISA HPC platforms and for managing data movement between DEISA sites. DEISA therefore has had to install and maintain yet another infrastructure to handle operating system (OS) and batch scheduler heterogeneity of the DEISA HPC platforms. DEISA already has a UNICORE-based infrastructure (http://www.unicore.eu/) for handling such heterogeneity.
EPCC, through its involvement in eDIKT2, has collaborated with various members of the DEISA consortium to investigate two specific aspects of the LSP. Firstly can the LSP be adapted to work with a standards-based open source portal framework. Secondly, can an open-source standards based LSP work with DEISA’s existing open source UNICORE-based infrastructure for handling batch scheduler and OS heterogeneity. If it can, this potentially allows more efficient operation of the DEISA infrastructure since it will remove the need to maintain the Engin-Frame based infrastructure for accessing the HPC platforms
Achievements
A new LSP has been implemented that contains a sub-set of the functionality in the original EnginFrame-based LSP. The portlets in the new portal exploit the JSR 286 standard [2] as the Open Grid Forum SAGA standard [3] for job submission and data management, and the SAML standard [4] for identiy management and delegation.
eDEISAPortalDemoVideoV1_editedV1.mov - Here is a demonstration of the new standards-based LSP
References
[1] “Final report on operation and impact of Life Science Portal”, eDEISA eSA3 report, Deliverable ID D-eSA3-A3, EU Contract No. 031513, June 2008.
[2] JSR 286 Portlet Specification 2.0, http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=286
[3] Open Grid Forum (OGF) Simple API for Grid Applications Core Working Group (SAGA-CORE-WG), http://www.ogf.org/gf/group_info/view.php?group=saga-core-wg
[4] S. Cantor et al. “Assertions and Protocols for the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) V2.0”, OASIS Standard, March 2005. http://docs.oasisopen.org/security/saml/v2.0/saml-core-2.0-os.pdf