IT-Tude.com → Technical solutions → Solutions → 

EnginFrame Grid Portal

The EnginFrame Grid Portal provides an efficient infrastructure to put Grid-empowered applications on your corporate Intranet/Internet.
Application interfaces can be tailored to the specific user’s skills or access rights. Users can therefore access and control their computing and engineering resources via an intuitive, standards compliant Web interface, virtually from anywhere using a standard Web browser.
EnginFrame’s core advantage is the evolutionary migration to the Computing Portal paradigm. Leveraging the existing investments in scripting, it can mirror most established usage patterns and complement them with powerful and flexible Web-based enhancements.
With several advanced Web widgets specifically designed for compute- and data-intensive activities, controlling Grid-empowered applications becomes a user-friendly experience, without sacrificing user productivity when handling complex tasks. And with the remote file management built into EnginFrame unnecessary files transfers are avoided.
EnginFrame can be easily plugged on several different scheduler or grid middleware like: Platform LSF, Sun Grid Engine, PBS, gLite, etc…

High Level Architecture

EnginFrame (EF) architecture uses a three levels model. The first level (on the right) is represented by Grid Resources. These can be Storage and Data, Interactive applications, Batch applications and Hardware resources. These resources must be instrumented with an EF Agent. The role of the EF Agent is to translate HTTP requests coming from the EF Server to commands for the selected resource.

The second level is the portal itself. Application’s interfaces are defined with a standard XML format. The user can select the application he wants to use and he specifies, compiling a form, all the required parameters. Input files can be selected both from the user PC and from the remote storage area. The output can be downloaded from the portal to the user PC or moved automatically to another remote area.

Every service defined in the EF portal respects the JSR168 standard and can be exposed in any portlet container. EF is certified to be compliant with IBM WebSphere Enterprise Portal.

The third level is the user level. EF exposes his services through standard HTTP interfaces. So any browser can be used to launch grid application and manage Grid resources from PC, laptop, PDA, smartphones, etc…

EF creates automatically for every service defined in the portal a WSDL interface. In this way can be very easy for the developers to connect grid applications to other applications or workflow engines.

Also a J2EE API is offered by EF to plug, directly to the portal, any Java application.

Usage Scenario

The user log-in into the portal providing is own credentials (username, password or whatever your authentication system requires). EF can be linked with any authentication system (NIS, LDAP, Active Directory, MyProxy, etc…).

The EF authorization system decides which services the user is able to see and/or use. Portal administrators can restrict the access to some applications to a defined class of users.

A panel on the left side of the page displays all available services. The user selects the preferred service and the portal prompts a form where the user can specify all the parameters of the job. Then user presses the “Submit” button and the job is submitted to the scheduler or the grid middleware.

If the user requires an interactive application (es: MS Word) than a connection is established between the remote desktop virtualization tool installed on the server side and the client. EF currently supports the following remote desktop tools:

  • Citrix metaFrame
  • IBM DCV
  • NoMachine's NX
  • VNC

On the top of the page EF displays management services. From this panel users can control their jobs execution, suspend or kill jobs, control and download the job’s outputs.

The portal administrator must:

  • Specify the application interface using an XML standard language
  • Define Access Control List (ACL) in order to restrict the access to services (optional). ACL are defined in XML. (NICE srl. can also provide a web interface to ACL definition)
  • Change the layout of the portal (adding logos, changing colours, etc…) (optional)

Dependencies

This is the list of supported systems and software configuration by EnginFrame v5.0 (updated version can be found here: www.enginframe.com):

  • Linux 2.4.x - Red Hat (Xeon – dual processor)
  • Linux 2.4.x - Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva (IA32)
  • Linux 2.6.x - Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva (IA32)
  • Linux 2.4.x - Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva (AMD64, X64)
  • Linux 2.6.x – Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva (AMD64, X64)
  • Linux 2.4.x - Debian (IA64)
  • Solaris 8 (UltraSPARC)
  • AIX 5.1 (PowerPC)
  • HP-UX 11.23 (Itanium2)
  • Windows Server 2003 R2 (AMD64, X64)

You need also a Scheduler or a Grid Middleware (like Platform LSF, PBS, SGE, gLite, UNICORE, Globus…) or you can configure EF to submit jobs directly to the operating system.

Interface

EnginFrame has three interfaces:

  • Web interface: the standard portal interface accessed trough a web-browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc…)
  • WSDL: every service defined in the portal is automatically exposed trough a WSDL interface so it can be accessed like a web-service application. More information can be found in the EF documentation
  • Java API: EF comes with a J2EE API so you can plug your java application to EF.

These are some screenshots taken from the current EF installation done for the BEinGRID project (BE18):

Welcome screen
Log-in screen
Remote file browsing

Metadata