Sun Microsystems is contributing its Grid Engine Portal portlet technology to the open source Grid Engine Project.
The portlet, which integrates Sun ONE Grid Engine software with Sun ONE Server Portal technology, lets commercial enterprises and research institutions securely access Grid resources from virtually any location inside or outside the firewall. It can be particularly useful in collaborative environments, providing remote team members, partners and suppliers with secure access to compute resources in a central Grid.
The portlet provides a Java-based capability which can enable customers to securely access Internet-based applications and resources in Grid environments powered by Sun's Grid Engine software.
With the Grid Engine Portal portlet and the Sun ONE Portal Server, users can: execute applications through a transparent interface to Grid Engine software; monitor job status; upload input files to the Grid Engine Portal with a single click; and download output files to a local system.
"Open source development is a cornerstone of Sun's Grid computing vision," said Wolfgang Gentzsch, Sun's director of Grid Computing. "As we've seen with the success of the Grid Engine open source project, bringing the Grid Engine Portal portlet to open source widens the technology's reach and will help further the adoption of Grid computing as a whole."
"The Sun technical computing portal has filled a niche for OSC that has enabled us to deliver high-end computational resources in a Web environment to the state's computational biology research community," said Eric Stahlberg, senior systems manager for the Ohio Supercomputer Center. "The open architecture of the portal's design was a key factor that enabled OSC to integrate a number of diverse platforms, including Sun Fire 6800 systems and TimeLogic DeCypher genomic accelerators. We have also completed proof-of-concept integration for other platforms, including Cray supercomputers, and are exploring further integration with OSC Linux cluster systems."
The open source Grid Engine Project, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, can be found at http://www.gridengine.sunsource.net. Sun ONE Grid Engine software is also available as a free download at http://www.sun.com/grid.
The portlet technology contributed to the open source project provides a customizable interface to the Sun ONE Portal Server, a platform for building business-to-employee, business-to-business and business-to-consumer portals, enabling the personalized delivery of content, services, business processes and applications. The Portal Server is part of the Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE) offering - an open, integratable product portfolio to enable the development and delivery of Java Web services. For more information, visit http://sun.com/software/products/portal_srvr.
Sun took a survey of attendees at the recent Supercomputing 2002 show in Baltimore that found that 50% of respondents are planning to implement a Grid within the next year, and that portal access to the Grid is strongly (63%) desired.
Sun also met with analysts this week to discuss the role of Grid computing in Sun's new N1 data center initiative, which Peter Jeffcock, group marketing manager for Sun's Client and Technical Market Products Group, described as "bringing the benefits of Grid to the entire data center."
Grid is "a component of virtualization," Jeffcock said, and the goal of N1 is to "virtualize the entire data center."
Sun ONE Grid Marketing Manager John Tollefsrud noted that both Grid and N1 are in the same organization at Sun because of their similarities. The goal of N1 is to "get the customer from out of managing the data center to managing services," he said.
For more information on N1, visit www.sun.com/n1.
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