Hidden access mechanism for demonstrating and teaching Grid

Abstract

There is a large number of legacy code applications that require a lot of resources, such as compute and storage resources. Grid computing is able to provide these resources for legacy applications but they cannot be executed on the Grid without either re-engineering or converting these codes into Grid services. One of the solutions to gridify these codes is the Grid Execution Management for Legacy Code Applications (GEMLCA) that ports legacy codes into Grid services without code re-engineering and with minimum user effort using the P-GRADE portal to provide a user-friendly environment. Access to Grid environments, among others to GEMLCA, requires registration and/or certificate, which some users may not have. They raise several problems towards demonstration and learning environments, such as access control and security issues. The GEMLCA team developed the concept of a Grid demonstration and teaching environment, which includes the GEMLCA Demonstration Environment (GDE) and the GEMLCA Learning Environment (GLE) to fulfil the above objective. GDE allows non-registered users to check the GEMLCA functionality and learn how to use it not having a registration or even a valid certificate using an account pool and a certificate pool. This environment gives a limited access to GEMLCA and Grid resources through quota and lifetime control. GLE, which is built on GDE, supports running tutorials of Grid courses and seminars