SPURport

The poster presents a successful implementation of the SPURport - a prototype Grid Portal for the earthquake engineering community. Developed as a pert of the SPUR project, it extends functionality of the NEESgrid, which in turn, is an application of OGSI/Globus 3.0. We found that the implementation of a Grid portal is much easier when one introduces high-level middle-tier services that aggregate and coordinate lower-level services provided by the Globus toolkit. For example, our high level job submission service orchestrates resolution of logical entities to physical ones, file transfers, and data streaming prior to actual the resources allocation. We found it very useful to employ application descriptors that facilitate automatic generation of RSL documents.