Plugging grids into computing portals: the PROGRESS grid resource broker plug-in mechanism

摘要

The grid research that has been intensely undertaken in the recent years has resulted in a long list of excellent solutions for the access to and utilization of powerful remote computing resources. Some of these solutions have emerged into standards or good practices widely accepted by the grid community. However, a lot of other important standards are yet to be found and the range of available middleware, protocols and services causes not only a serious problem when deciding on the technology to be used for a particular grid environment, but also poses a major challenge when trying to solve some ongoing issues. The lack of standards and heterogeneity of the grid middleware used is, for example, a big challenge when designing science gateways that are set to provide the scientific community with means of accessing the vast amount of the powerful grid resources delivered by multiple independent grid infrastructures administered by different types of grid management systems. In this paper, we present a method by which we addressed this problem within the PROGRESS project and how it resulted in the design of the grid resource broker plug-in mechanism, which allows the enabling of resources belonging to heterogeneous grid infrastructures within a computing portal.