Gridscape II: An extensible grid monitoring portal architecture and its integration with Google Maps

Abstract

A pervasive problem seen in information management is information fragmentation, where information may be fragmented by physical location, device or even by the various tools designed to help manage it. Coupled with the explosion of information we see today, identifying information that is really important to us becomes difficult. In areas such as Network and Grid system management, this problem hinders our ability to plan and make intelligent decisions. Grid computing is particularly affected due to the inherent difficulty in dealing with distributed heterogeneous resources over various administrative domains. In this paper we present Gridscape II, a customisable portal component that can be used on its own or plugged-in to compliment existing Grid portals. Gridscape II manages the gathering of information from arbitrary, heterogeneous and distributed sources and presents them together seamlessly within a single interface. To provide an interactive user interface we leverage the Google Maps API, which has recently been adopted extensively as a highly-effective and innovative means of presenting information with geographic location. Gridscape II is simple and easy to use, providing a solution to those users who do not wish to invest heavily in developing their own monitoring portal from scratch, and also for those users who want something easy to customise and extend for their specific needs. Its simple and generic design means it can also directly be used in other, non-Grid related applications.

Keywords:

• grid computing
• Google Maps
• monitoring
• grid portal

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Google for inspiring the latest version of Gridscape with the release of its Google Maps API. We appreciate Srikumar Venugopal for sharing his thoughts on the implementation of Gridscape II. This work is partially supported by research grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST).