Computing Portal Working Group (formerly Datorr)

This(http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~gregor/datorr) is a joint activity of
the JavaGrande Forum and the newly formed Gridforum activity, which
links the major high performance computing activities building the
infrastructure for computational grids. This working group was
originally called Datorr with this acronym denoting Desktop Access to
Remote Resources. The new terminology more clearly describes the
mission of this group and relates it to the exploding field of
enterprise information portals (as described by Merrill Lynch in
http://www.sagemaker.com/company/lynch.htm). Further computing portal
research activities have been launched by both NASA's Information
Power Grid (http://science.nas.nasa.gov/IPG ) and the NSF partnership
in computational infrastructure centered at Illinois (The NCSA
Alliance http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/alliance/). We will leverage these
and other projects in our further work. We also hope that the more
descriptive name will encourage broad involvement in our activities
and welcome new participants.

The previous mission and activities of the Datorr working group will
continue unchanged with the new name. Since our last report at the end
of 1998, we held a good meeting on February 15th and 16th, 1999 at
Sandia National Laboratory. Judy Beringer of Sandia National, and
Gregor von Laszewski of Argonne National Laboratory organized the
meeting. The technical preparation for the meeting was steered by
Geoffrey C. Fox, Dennis Gannon, Piyush Mehotra, and Gregor von
Laszewski. The meeting had over 25 participants with in particular
contributions from the Gateway, Hotpage, Legion, NetSolve, Ninf,
Ninja, and Unicore groups. The meeting broke up into two working
groups discussing roughly the user/service and service backend
resource interfaces respectively. In the latter case we identified the
importance of the use of XML in describing computing related
resources. We targeted a demonstration of the use of this technology
with a simple web based interface to computing resources by SC99 in
November 99. The first group continued the definition of the user view
and task object started at our first meeting. As a follow-up, the
Globus team has been very active in the investigation of the use of
XML as one of the core technologies for interchanging information
between different components of the Globus and the portal
architecture. They have demonstrated that XML can be used as a
language to describe components, jobs and tasks. Furthermore, they
showed that the information expressed through the Grid Metacomputing
Directory Service can be exposed as objects defined in XML.

In defining the proper institutional implementation of the Computing
Portal working group, we are pleased that the voluntary contributions
by the Globus project allowing Gregor von Laszewski, Argonne National
Laboratory, to work partially in this effort will be continued and
enhanced with other NCSA Alliance resources. We discussed the
architecture defined by the Datorr group at the Alliance meeting in
Chicago in May and found widespread approval. Current Alliance plans
for developing application specific computing portals was
substantially built on the work of Datorr and we expect continued
close collaboration. We are in the process of forming subgroups to
work on selected common portal architecture requirements and
implementations.

Gregor von Laszewski will continue to serve as secretary for the
working group and will organize future workshops. These Computing
Portal workshops will be coordinated with the Gridforum and the
JavaGrande Forum in order to leverage one another’s efforts. The
working group will register the domain name www.computingportal.org.
During the month of July, the current Datorr web pages
(http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~gregor/datorr) will be transferred to the
new web site, which will be hosted at Argonne National Laboratory. The
mailing list datorr@mcs.anl.gov will temporarily continue to exist
until the move to the new domain name is completed. Once completed, a
new set of mailing lists will be created. We intend to schedule the
next Workshop alongside Grid forum and JavaGrande meetings.