The Scientific Portal (SciPortal)

Project was partially supported by OSC, DoD, and participants family time.

SciPortal

Front end, Problem Solving Environment (PSE) in which problems to be solved are stated, translated into requests for computational resources (such as software, hardware, information resources and other types of resources), and an analysis of the results can be performed. This multi-step view of doing science is encompassed in the toolkits. Based initially on servlets, but JSPs were introduced later on.
 

WebFlow

Middle Tier -- necessary services and operations to provide information, access to back end resources, persistance, authentication and authorization, hierarchy of contexts, parsing, file services, data communcation, etc. Webflow used CORBA to communicate between objects in the client (applet) and on the server.
 

Back End

Actual HPC. We used ssh for logging to user accounts without password (./ssh/authorized_keys), We could have used Globus, but GIS was not yet ready for prime time. In fact, most code to interact with Globus was written.