Rapid Development Tool for Job Submission Portlets

We aim to build a portlet that allows developers and advanced users to create and deploy quickly job submission portlets. The portlet builder should allow specification of the parameters to their applications, and even allow parameter sweeps to be set up so as to do their in-silico experiments and sensitivity analyses. Job submission portlets will be deployed dynamically in the portal. Such a tool fits well in OMII-UK's portal support call, as it would speed up the deployment of portals that provide an interface to applications of end-users.

All of the interdisciplinary projects at the National e-Science Institute, and many other e-Science projects, currently depend on GridSphere as an interface to the end-users. Unfortunately, at the moment for each project, custom built portlets need to be developed, which requires training of personnel. Also, this process allows mistakes to be made over and over again during the development of each portlet. If we could generate these portlets in an automatic manner, based on end-user requirements, we could rapidly respond to users' ever evolving needs by quickly deploying appropriate job submission portlets. As the build tool itself is a portlet running in a portal, we can do the design of the portlet on-site together with end-users.

When specifying the job submission portlet interface, three type of parameters will be used: fixed, parameters that end-users cannot change; one-offs, parameters that end-users can change, with defaults supplied; and sweeps, which allows performing running multiple experiments.

We will develop a portlet that allows us to create rapidly and deploy job submissions portlets based on user requirements. The requirements are captured by using the portlet to build a job submission interface. The job submission interface is itself a portlet and can be shown to end-users immediately. More specifically, a designer or software engineer creates a set of parameters with defaults and parameter sweeps. The tool translates this in to a portlet, which the developer is able to deploy dynamically in to the same GridSphere portal. The generated portlet will describe jobs in JSDL and use GridSAM to submit its jobs to large computing facilities, such as the UK's NGS or to a locally maintained Condor cluster.

Although numerous projects have created portlets for job submissions, we are not aware of any tools to automate the process of translating user requirements in to a job submission portlet interface.

The focus of this project lies on developing the dynamic portlet builder and its documentation, and to make sure its functional requirements can be achieved in the duration of the project, it will not deviate into other issues such as security and data deliveries.