Grid Portal Design and Usability Evaluation

Grid technology utilizes and manages the distributed computing infrastructure. The distributed resources appear to end-users as a single virtual environment. Currently, there are a wide variety of researches based on Grid, from both academia and industries over the world. However, most grid platforms are usually based on UNIX. Thus, the users can interact with a grid system mainly through a set of complex command line interfaces. The complexity of such command lines can be potential problems for non-UNIX users as they are not familiar with text-mode commands. Grid Portal is a web-based application that provides various services for grid resources access. It simplifies the interface to grid infrastructures by providing users with a customized view of resources at both the software and the hardware levels. In our work, we designed and implemented the grid portal. The users' satisfactions on using the portal are also evaluated using the Analysis of Variance technique. The results indicated that our portal design is suitable for grid novice users.