UC-EUMEDGrid-access
From EGI Knowledge Base
Use Case title: Accessing the EGEE gLite middleware service through a web portal (GENIUS).
Short description:
Actors involved: End-users and GENIUS portal developers
Related Requirements: All the services provided by the EGEE middleware are normally made available and presented to the users through a Command Line Interfaces (CLI). There are tens of different commands with many options and rigid sequences and the description of jobs has even a dedicated language (the Job Description Language or JDL) to be learnt.
This combination of rather complex/new items to know for a newcomer could have the negative effect of discouraging many potential users from learning how to profit from the Grid technology. Difficulties which could be even more severe when dealing with user communities which are not accustomed to face with Unix terminals/commands. What a generic users’ community would like to do is access the Grid services from all kind of appliances and from everywhere in the world, as they do with the World Wide Web. To overcome these drawbacks, and taking into account the growing heterogeneity of the EUMEDGRID users, the training community decided to start using within the tutorial activities a web portal to the GILDA environment, GENIUS (Grid Enables eNvironment for site Indepent User job Submission) which grants a transparent access to all the services and resources of the t-infrastructure. The use of Grid portal such as GENIUS aims to hide the complexity of the underlying middle-ware to the end-users and allow researchers involved in the different scientific domains, such us archaeologists, agronomists, physics, hydrologists and so forth, to run their applications on a Grid environment.
Since the adoption of Grid portals allow to improve the appealing and the adoption of the Grid paradigm in new scientific areas, WP4 will push toward the develop of such new services on the GENIUS Grid Portal so as to allow users to run their applications in a easy way and exploit, as much as possible, the computational power provided by the Grid.
