The GISELA Science Gateway for VRCs

The Science Gateway is a Web site allowing users to fully exploit the e-Infrastructure capabilities through a normal web-browser implementing as main functionalities: simple authentication mechanisms (hiding digital certificates management) and intuitive user interfaces to execute Applications on the e-Infrastructure (hiding complex middleware interfaces).

The GISELA Science Gateway - GSG (https://gisela-gw.ct.infn.it/) has been deployed at the beginning of the second project-year. It has been designed to be fully VRC-driven with a section specific to  each VRC supported. The GSG home page is shown below.

VRC sections and Applications deployed in the GISELA ScienceGateway

Applications in the VRC: Culturage Heritage

Applications to be integrated in the VRC: Cultural Heritage

Applications in the VRC: Earth Sciences

Applications to be integrated in the VRC: Earth Sciences

Applications in the VRC: Industry

Applications in the VRC: Life Sciences

Updated by Ph.Gavillet (August 2012)

The monitoring of the Network component of the GISELA e- infrastructure has been performed by WP5, using the perfSONAR middleware which enables to measure and display different parameters like: bandwidth, jitter, delay for every link in a multi domain networks. For this purpose WP5 has deployed monitoring points in several Resource Centers, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Measurement Points installed in GISELA project

Ticket System

To manage any network problem and attend any network provision request a ticket system has been installed. It can be reached using the link https://giselart.cecalc.ula.ve

From MonGISELA, one can easily obtain real-time graphs of packet losses percentage and delay between RCs. The graph below shows the minimum and average delay (blue and red lines, respectively) and the packets lost percentage (black dots) between the UFRJ and CEDIA RCs on June, 27 2012.

Administration Procedures

The procedures to administrate the monitoring platform are described in the following document:

GISELA Network Resource Provision Operation Manual

Updated by Philippe Gavillet (July 2012)

WP4 cares of offering easy access to all kinds of users, of supporting all relevant services with the ultimate view  to establish a  self-sustainable e-Infratsruture.

On July 4, 2012 the CERN Director General announced the 1st observation of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. The news transformed into a snowball being rolling all around the world in the TV and radio flashes thus generating a kind of "Higgsteria".

The GISELA Community was particularly excited by the information. Indeed several Latin American Institutions, members of GISELA, such as UFRJ (Brazil), UNAM (México), UniAndes (Colombia), etc. are using its e-Infrastructure, in the framework of the Computing model of the LHC experiments in which they participate. The picture below, shows the cumulative use of the GISELA e-Infrastructure by these institutions, for their various computing tasks such as simulation of physics processes, detector data processing and physics analysis. One should emphasize that Grid e-Infrastructures is a must for High Energy Physics experiments which could not otherwise deal with the sophisticated, CPU-consuming treatment of the data provided by their particle detectors. Hence it was really wonderful to observe, on a sensational case, the actual discovery power of Grid .

 The following figures show the GISELA e-Infrastructure contribution to the worldwide Grid usage, over Sep.2011 - Jun. 2012. All numbers  are given in wall time hours.

The graph  aggregates all VOs, regardless of discipline or VRC. The accounting method is described in detail on WP4 first deliverable.

WP6 provides support for a variety of specialised grid services, both oriented to improve the experience of application developers, as well as oriented to provide better administration of the grid infrastructure.

One of these services is the OurGrid middleware. A small OurGrid Community is currently in operation. A live snapshot of the system can be seen at https://status.ourgrid.org/, while statistics gathered along the time are available at https://charts.ourgrid.org/. More details on how to deploy an OurGrid site or how to use OurGrid to run bag-of-tasks applications can be found at https://www.ourgrid.org/. You can also try the system without installing any software, by simply creating an account in our public portal available at https://portal.ourgrid.org/.

GISELA users can also use DIRAC Services through Web Portals. DIRAC Web Portal is a secure interface based on grid certificates, that allows users to display information from jobs as JDLs, attributes, history, peek output of jobs while running, access logs, plot statistics, and also perform actions on a job or group of jobs, such as: reschedule, kill or delete jobs.  In other words, it mimics a desktop application. The users must be registered in the DIRAC server in order to fully use the Web Portal, and the requirement is to belong to one of the VOs supported by GISELA. Currently, three portals have been deployed: one at UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro (https://dirac.eela.if.ufrj.br/), another at UFCG in Campina Grande (https://guaivira.lsd.ufcg.edu.br/), and the other is at UP in Porto (https://dirac.up.pt/). The three web portals are connected to DIRAC Central Services, this ensures that the same data is showed indifferently of which portal is used. For applying to an account, please send an e-mail to Vanessa Hamar at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Finally, users can also access GISELA infrastructure through the GISELA Scientific Gateway. It uses the SAGA API to seamlessly submit jobs to bith the gLite and the OurGrid infrastructures, thanks to the JSAGA OurGrid Adaptor that has been developed as part of the WP6 activities.