NMI: Collaborative Proposal: Middleware for Grid Portal Development

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This proposal is designed to facilitate grid portal development using the portlet/container approach to building portals. This approach separates portal control and basic services from content. A central control server provides basic portal services such as authentication, access control, and user customizability. Into this framework, portal content and custom services are plugged in using software components called portlets. The container manages the organization and interaction of the portlets, and the portlets deliver specific web content (either local or remote), including Grid service interfaces.The portlet-based design concept supports distributed, loosely coupled development and deployment: user interfaces and science interface components can be developed independently, using the standard portlet API, and then reused between portals. Services and interfaces may be installed and added to various portals in a well-defined way. The portlet model is also an ideal fit to the emerging Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and its implementation specification, the Open Grid Service Infrastructure (OGSI). Because OGSI is based on the new web-service standards, each Grid service can be directly accessed by a custom portlet. The impact of making the Grid readily approachable by the international community of researchers is potentially extremely large, as the immense resources that have been collected and organized in recent years by the underlying Grid technologies become visible as usable components of the global research community's desktop. This project will greatly simplify the use of Grid technologies and allow new services to be made readily available to individual researchers and groups by enabling the proliferation of Grid portal technology through reusability and simplification of installation. Scientists will be able to easily form flexible groups with collaborators across the world and use the Grid to share data and resources. This project provides tools for collaboration between established and ad hoc groups of users, enabling those scientists to communicate effectively with each other about the science they are doing, and providing customized views of the Grid that are tailored to meet the needs of collaborating groups.