CISL Annual Report 2005 > Earth System Knowledge Environment plans

SCD Portal plans

From the beginning, the overall vision for the SCD Portal was to provide the scientific community with an easy-to-use, flexible, and feature-rich single sign-on web interface to SCD's computing resources. Our team visualized a tool, or combination of tools, that would provide a customizable environment where scientists could choose web page content based on their interests and conduct all of their scientific work through the Portal interface. The Portal would provide a homogeneous interface for an underlying heterogeneous computing platform, therefore allowing scientists to concentrate on their science rather than computing.

The features we plan to target in the coming years include file transfer, batch job creation wizards, directory structure searching, file management for supercomputers and mass storage, as well as increased access to consulting services such as a searchable knowledge base, collected and searchable documentation, and online directories. In addition, linking to SCD's Data Portal, other Portals, and the Grid will provide enterprise-level services of unprecedented scale to the community. All of this will be available to scientists from any internet-connected computer worldwide.

Before we can provide this level of service however, we must surmount a few technical challenges, the most salient being security concerns and data transfer sizes. What we need to accomplish is to build a web system that mimics a stateful session using stateless protocols. Also of concern is the limitation of the client browser to manage large amounts of data without introducing excessive latency. These issues, and others, will be our challenges for the following year, and most likely, other years to come. These are challenges we will meet as we strive to provide excellence in computational resources for our user community.

Two new features to be released for the SCD Portal in FY2006.