Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Example: The EnginFrame
Portal Environment
virtualization layer invokes specific middleware
commands and translates results, jobs and Grid
resource descriptions into a portable XML for-
mat called GridML that abstracts from the actual
underlying Grid technology. For the GridML, as
for the service description XML, the framework
provides pre-built XSLs to translate GridML into
HTML. EnginFrame data management allows for
browsing and handling data on the client side or
remotely archived in the Grid and then to host a
service working environment in file system areas
called spoolers.
The EnginFrame architecture is structured into
three tiers, Client, Resource, Server. The Client
Tier normally consists of the user's Web browser
and provides an easy-to-use interface based on
established Web standards like XHTML and Ja-
vaScript, and it is independent from the specific
software and hardware environment used by the
end user. When needed, the client tier also provides
integration with desktop virtualization technolo-
gies like Citrix Metaframe (ICA), VNC, X, and
Nomachine NX. The Resource Tier consists of
one or more Agents deployed on the back-end
Grid infrastructure whose role is to control and
provide distributed access to the actual computing
resources. The Server Tier consists of a server
component that provides resource brokering to
manage resource activities in the back-end.
The EnginFrame server authenticates and au-
thorizes incoming requests from the Web, and asks
an Agent to execute the required actions. Agents
can perform different kind of actions that range
from the execution of a simple command on the
underlying Operating System, to the submission
of a job to the grid. The results of the executed
action are gathered by the Agent and sent back to
the Server which applies post processing trans-
formations, filters the output according to ACLs
and transforms the results into a suitable format
according to the nature of the client: HTML for
Web browsers and XML in a SOAP message for
Web services client applications.
EnginFrame (2008) is a Web-based portal technol-
ogy that enables the access and the exploitation of
grid-enabled applications and infrastructures. It al-
lows organizations to provide application-oriented
computing and data services to both users (via Web
browsers) and in-house or ISV applications (via
SOAP/WSDL based Web services), thus hiding the
complexity of the underlying Grid infrastructure.
Within a company or department, an enterprise
portal aggregates and consolidates the services
and exposes them to the users, through the Web.
EnginFrame can be integrated as Web applica-
tion in a J2EE standard application server or as a
portlet in a JSR168 compliant portlet container.
As a Grid portal framework, EnginFrame offers
a wide range of functionalities to IT developers
facing the task to provide application-oriented
services to the end users. EnginFrame's plug-in
mechanism allows to easily and dynamically
extend its set of functionalities and services. A
plug-in is a self-contained software bundle that
encapsulates XML Extensible Markup Language
service descriptions, custom layout or XSL Ex-
tensible Stylesheet Language and the scripts or
executables involved with the services actions. A
flexible authentication delegation offers a wide
set of pre-configured authentication mechanisms:
OS/NIS/PAM, LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory,
MyProxy, Globus, etc. It can also be extended
throughout the plug-in mechanism.
Besides authentication, EnginFrame provides
an authorization framework that allows to define
groups of users and Access Control Lists (ACLs),
and to bind ACLs to resources, services, service
parameters and service results. The Web interface
of the services provided by the portal can be au-
thorized and thus tailored to the specific users'
roles and access rights.
EnginFrame supports a wide variety of
compute Grid middleware like LSF, PBS, Sun
Grid Engine, Globus, gLite and others. An XML
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