Speaker
Ms
Antonia Tugores
(CSIC)
Description
For a long time grid has been used practically only by large projects which can afford to have fine-tuned sophisticated interfaces for the researchers involved on these projects. Without these interfaces the access to grid using shell commands is quite cumbersome for nowadays point and click standards. There are many research areas in which small teams or even individual researchers may need to run many jobs in an efficient manner. While most high throughput computational needs are very much suitable for what grid was intended for, very few users take advantage of it because the access is cumbersome and requires a learning period that many researchers, mainly in small groups, can not afford.
To facilitate the use, some user-friendly web applications have been developed for single applications. An example could be e-NMR interface for biomolecular nuclear magnetic resonance and structural biology. Other graphical environments that allow users to run their own applications such as Migrating Desktop, Ganga or P-GRADE Portal are too complex to be used without prior training.
To popularize grid it is required to have user friendly interfaces where simple programs can be easily uploaded and executed. Those interfaces should not aim at replacing sophisticated interfaces developed for specific applications. Neither it is required they allow all the options in submitting a job or in monitoring the grid system. On the contrary they should cover the most basic aspects and include suitable default options for the others. Web4Grid interface is intended to be a user-friendly web where grid users can submit their jobs and recover the results on an automatic way. Besides, the interface provides the capability to monitor the existing jobs and to check the (local) grid status (load, number of free cores available, ...). Web4Grid interface does not require specific grid usage training nor any knowledge about the middleware behind it.
| Duration (90min sessions) | 30 min |
|---|
Primary authors
Ms
Antonia Tugores
(CSIC)
Dr
Pere Colet
(CSIC)
