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GridScape: A Tool for Creation of Interactive and Dynamic Grid Testbed Web
Portals

The notion of grid computing is gaining popularity recently as a realistic
solution to
many of our large-scale data storage and processing needs. Because, it enables
the
sharing, selection and aggregation of resources geographically distributed
across
collaborative organisations. Now more and more people are beginning to embrace
grid
computing and thus are seeing the need to set up their own grids and grid
testbeds. With
this comes the need to have some means to enable them to view and monitor the
status of
the resources in these testbeds (eg. Web based Grid portal). Generally
developers invest a
substantial amount of time and effort developing custom monitoring software. To
overcome
this limitation, the Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne, Australia
has
developed a tool called Gridscape -- it enables the rapid creation of
interactive and
dynamic testbed portals (without any programming effort). Gridscape primarily
aims to
provide a solution for those users who need to be able to create a grid testbed
portal but
do not necessarily have the time or resources to build a system of their own
from scratch.

The key features of Gridscape are the following:
* It supports the rapid creation of Grid testbed portals;
* It allows simple portal management and administration;
* It provides an interactive and dynamic portal;
* It provides a clear and user-friendly overall view of Grid testbed
resources; and

Gridscape has already been used by a number of organisations to create their
Grid testbed
portals for visualising and monitor resources. They include Australian Virtual
Observatory
and UK AstroGrid Collaboration, Belle Data Analysis Grid, and our own World-Wide
Grid
(WWG) testbed.

An index of sites currently using the Gridscape software can be accessed at the
following
address: http://previn.cs.mu.oz.au:8080/gridscape/ and the testbed portals can
be browsed
online.

The developers of Gridscape 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 software,
please visit:
Gridbus Project Web page: http://www.gridbus.org/
Gridscape webpage: http://www.gridbus.org/gridscape
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