Flexibility and user-friendliness of grid portals: the PROGRESS approach Michal Kosiedowski, Cezary Mazurek Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, ul. Noskowskiego 10, 61-704 Poznan, Poland {kat, mazurek}@man.poznan.pl 1. Introduction The PROGRESS project [1] started in the end of 2001 as a grant from the Polish Committee of Scientific Research co-financed by Sun Microsystems. It aimed to design and implement an access environment to computational services performed by a cluster of Sun servers [2]. The grant, which finished in 2004 with the deployment of the PROGRESS HPC Portal [3], produced a set of grid-portal tools that were released under an open source license. These tools, advertised as the PROGRESS Package, allow to deploy a flexible grid access environment in various configurations ranging from a local area computing portal, through a campus solution to an inter-campus-wide system. In this paper we show how the results of the PROGRESS project may be used to deliver grid portal solutions and how they facilitate the construction, management and use of a grid portal. First, in section 2 we shortly review the novel architecture for a grid-portal environment that was designed by the project. Then, in section 3 we discuss the advantages that are brought by the approach that we assumed in PROGRESS. In section 4 we describe the reference installation of the PROGRESS Package and the type of grid applications enabled in this environment. We end with a short summary in section 5. 2. Architecture Figure 1 presents the PROGRESS approach to the grid-portal environment architecture. In this approach, apart from a classical grid management system enabled through a grid resource broker, we introduce the Grid Service Provider which acts as an additional layer between the actual user interfaces, such as, for example, portals and the grid. The Grid Service Provider features high-level grid services which facilitate the construction of grid portals and access to the computing resources [4, 5]. The whole computing environment is assisted by the Data Management System capable of storing large amounts of scientific data [5, 6]. Grid Resources Grid Resource Broker Data Management System Grid Service Provider Portlet Framework Portlets Grid Portal Grid Portal Grid Portal Computing Grid Management System Figure 1 PROGRESS approach to a grid-portal environment The Grid Service Provider groups several high-level grid services enabled through Web Services access interfaces. These services manage abstractive descriptors for various types of grid objects such as, for example, computing jobs or computing applications, and store them in an underlying database. Two most important services are the Job Submission Service and the Application Management Service: