A national grid submission gateway for eScience

Abstract

Much contemporary research benefits from the operation of the Grid for large-scale data storage, sharing, analysis, processing and simulation. However, existing grid systems typically require users to have good IT skills, which is a hurdle for many scientists. Providing easier usability of grid systems is a big challenge. A number of systems, frameworks and portals have been developed over the past few years, however they have mostly been designed to work based on several assumptions in a particular environment, and it is not easy to adapt them to different needs or environments. In this paper, we present our system that adopts several new technologies and acts as a broker and a gateway to regional grid resources. Interaction and usability are improved by multiple interfaces aimed at users with different requirements and IT skills: a modern and easy-to-use web interface, a SOAP web service interface and a Restful interface. The usability of this system is demonstrated in a case study.