Dear All,

We have recently released Gridscape II software, which is a Customisable
and Pluggable Grid Monitoring Portal Integrated with Google Maps. Brief
details on the software are given below. The software can be downloaded
from:
http://www.gridbus.org/gridscape

Thanks
Raj
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Gridscape II: A Customisable and Pluggable Grid Monitoring Portal and
its Integration with Google Maps

Grid computing has emerged as an effective means of facilitating the
sharing of distributed heterogeneous resources, enabling collaboration
in large scale environments. However, the nature of Grid systems,
coupled with the overabundance and fragmentation of information, makes
it difficult to monitor resources, services, and computations in order
to plan and make decisions.

The GRIDS Lab and the Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne
are pleased to release the Gridscape II software which manages the
gathering of information from arbitrary, heterogeneous and distributed
sources and presents them together seamlessly within a single
interface. It also leverages the Google Maps API in order to provide a
highly interactive user interface. Gridscape II is simple and easy to
use, providing a solution to those users who don't wish to invest
heavily in developing their own monitoring portal from scratch, and
also for those users who want something that is easy to customise and
extend for their specific needs.

Gridscape aims at providing a high-level, user-friendly and highly
customisable portal interface in order to present the status of Grid
resources. It interacts with existing technology so that no additional
installation or configuration of Grid resources is required. Major
improvements over the previous implementation of Gridscape are that it
supports the integration of multiple arbitrary information sources
through an extensible design; it provides a simple customisation
mechanism to allow it to be enhanced to meet the specific needs of
each individual Grid portal. Other improvements are integration with
Google Maps, simplified portal administration and the use of
portlet-based web components which means it can be plugged into other
Grid portals to compliment them.

The key features of Gridscape II are the following:
* It manages diverse forms of resource information from various
types of information sources;
* It provides a simple framework for introducing new information
service types;
* It provides simple portal management and administration;
* It provides a clear and intuitive presentation of resource
information in an interactive and dynamic portal
via Google Maps;
* It has a flexible design and implementation such that core
components can be reused in building new components,
presentation of information can be easily changed and a high
level of portability and accessibility (from the web browser
perspective) can be provided.

Gridscape II currently comes with implementations for MDS2 (Globus 2)
and MDS4 (Globus 4) information service types.

The developers of Gridscape II are: Hussein Gibbins and Rajkumar Buyya
from the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory at
the University of Melbourne, Australia.

For further information or to download the "open source" Gridscape II
software, please visit:
Gridbus Project Web page: http://www.gridbus.org/
Gridscape II webpage: http://www.gridbus.org/gridscape
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