A Web portal to simplify the scientific communities in using Grid and Cloud resources

The modern scientific applications demand increasing availability of computing and storage resources in order to collect and analyse big volume of data that often the single laboratories are not able to provide. Distributed computing models have proved to be a valid and effective solution. Proofs are the Grid, widely used in the high energy physics experiments, and Cloud solutions that are showing an increasing acceptance. These infrastructures require robust Authentication and Authorization mechanisms. The X.509 certificate is the standard used to authenticate Grid users and although it represents a valid security mechanism, many communities complain about the difficulty of handling digital certificates and the complexity of the Grid middleware. These represent the main obstacles to the full exploitation of computing and data distributed infrastructures. In order to simplify the use of these resources it has been developed a Web-based portal that provides users with several important functionalities such as job and workflow submission, interactive service and data management for both Grid and Cloud environments. The thesis describes the Portal architecture, its features, the main benefits for users and the custom views which have been defined and tested in collaboration with some communities to address relevant use cases