Web Interface for Generic Grid Jobs, Web4Grid

Abstract

For a long time grid has been used practically only by large projects which can afford to have fine-tuned sophisticated interfaces for the researchers involved on these projects. Grid has the potential to be a key instrument for a wide variety of scientific topics which require to perform many calculations, for example to explore complex system dynamics as function of parameters. The reduced size of the research groups and the diversity of problems makes unsuitable to develop specific interfaces in most of the instances while the cumbersome grid shell commands are a barrier that requires a significant amount of determination to overcome. Web4Grid interface is intended to be a user-friendly web where grid users can submit their jobs and recover the results on an automatic way. Besides the interface provides the capability to monitor the existing jobs and to check the (local) grid status (load, number of free cores available, ...). Web4Grid interface does not require specific grid usage training nor any knowledge about the middleware behind it.