Conventional grid-enabled portal designs have been largely influenced by the usual functional requirements such as security requirements, grid resource requirements and job management requirements. However, the pay-as-you-use service provisioning model of utility computing platforms mean that additional requirements must be considered in order to realize effective grid-enabled portals design for such platforms. This work investigates those relevant additional
requirements that must be considered for the design of grid-enabled portals for utility computing
contexts.
Based on a thorough review of literature, we identified a number of those relevant additional
requirements, and developed a grid-enabled portal prototype for the Grid-based Utility
Infrastructure for SMME-enabling Technology (GUISET) initiative – a utility computing platform.
The GUISET portal was designed to cater for both the traditional grid requirements and some of
the relevant additional requirements for utility computing contexts. The result of the evaluation of
the GUISET portal prototype using a set of benchmark requirements (standards) revealed that it
fulfilled the minimum requirements to be suitable for the utility context