Vine Toolkit—Towards portal based production solutions for scientific and engineering communities with grid-enabled resources support

Abstract

In large scale production and scientific, academic environments, the information sets to perform computations on come from various sources. In particular, some computations may require the information obtained as a result of previous computations. Workflow description offers an attractive approach to formally deal with such complex processes. Vine Toolkit solution addresses some major challenges here such as the synchronization of distributed workflows, establishing a community driven grid environment for the seamless results sharing and collaboration. In order to accomplish these goals Vine Toolkit offers integration on different layers starting from rich user interface web components embedded in portal frameworks like GridSphere or Liferay, integration with workflow engine and grid security and ending up with a built-in meta-scheduling mechanisms, that allow IT administrators to perform load balancing automatically among computing clusters and data centers to meet peak demands. As a result of the wow2green project a complete solution has been developed and delivered and still is being adopted in the pending projects like PL-Grid.