GUSE

The Grid and Cloud User Support Environment (gUSE), also known as WS-PGRADE (Web Service – Parallel Grid Run-time and Application Development Environment) /gUSE, is an open source science gateway framework that enables users to access grid and cloud infrastructures. gUSE is developed by the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at Institute for Computer Science and Control (SZTAKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

A relevant requirement in the development of gUSE was to enable the simultaneous handling of a very large number of jobs, even in the range of millions, without compromising the response time at the user interface. In order to achieve this level of concurrency, the workflow management back-end of gUSE is implemented based on the web service concept of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

There are many user communities who would like to access several DCIs in a transparent way but they don’t want to learn the peculiar features of the used DCIs. They want to concentrate their scientific application - for them using a Science Gateway (SG) is the solution. An SG provides an interface between a scientist (or community) and the distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs). An SG framework, like gUSE, provides a specific set of enabling technologies as well as frontend and backend services that together build a generic gateway. SG frameworks are not specialized for a certain scientific area and hence scientists from many different areas can use them. An enabling technology such as gUSE provides the required software stack to develop SG frameworks and SG instances (provide a simplified user interface that is highly tailored to the needs of the given scientific community). Typical examples of such enabling technologies are: web application containers (Tomcat, Glassfish, etc.), portal or web application frameworks (Liferay, Spring, etc.), database management systems (MySQL, etc.), workflow management systems (gUSE itself, MOTEUR, etc.)

SGs can have varying goals. In general, researchers who use gateways can focus on their scientific goals and less on assembling the e-Infrastructure that is required. An important goal is to make it easier for scientists to use (national) computing and storage resources, while creating and using collaborative tools for sharing data.

The SG framework can be used by National Grid Initiatives (NGIs) to support small user communities who cannot afford to develop their own customized SG. The gUSE SG framework also provides two Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), namely the Application-Specific Module API and the Remote API, to create application-specific SGs according to the needs of different user communities.

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