The Nimrod Portal

Nimrod/G is a widely adopted Grid middleware environment for building and managing large computational experiments over distributed resources. One of the goals of the Nimrod project is to create a user friendly interface to give scientists access to large computational experimentation. Traditionally, users had to install Nimrod/G locally on their client machine, and this requires a significant amount of other infrastructure software (such as Globus, Python, etc) to be present. And because Grid experiments often run for many days, having the portal interface allows the user to log off and return to their experiments later. The Nimrod Portal also has support for Nimrod/O and Nimrod/E type experiments.

The Nimrod Portal supports multiple resources and crendentails which allows users' to create their own ad-hoc grids. In order to simplify Nimrod/G access, we have developed a Web based portal that allows users to log into a central Nimrod/G point-of-presence rather than launching it from their own machine. This also reduces the problem of firewall configurations between the user’s computer and their resources as all their files are transferred from the central Nimrod installation.

The current Nimrod/G portal is based on standard CGI technology using UNIX scripting and C++ code and is optimised to run on a production quality web server.