An Integrated Grid Portal for Managing Energy Resources

The discovery and management of energy resources, especially at locations in the Gulf of Mexico, requires an economic but technically enhanced infrastructure. Research teams from Louisiana State University, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and Southern University Baton Rouge are engaged in a collaborative effort to create a ubiquitous computing and monitoring system (UCoMS) for the discovery and management of energy resources. The UCoMS team has sucessfully addressed two difficult issues in this research: (1) the computational challenges faced by compute-intensive simulations for reservoir uncertainty analysis that requires thousands of simulations and deals with terabytes, and even petabytes, of data, (2) the development of a prototype wireless sensor network (WSN) infrastructure to collect and process realtime data from production locations. While the former requires the intensive computational power of the UCoMS grid resources, the latter requires efficient interfacing between WSN & grid. A unified workflow analysis has been performed to ensure smooth operation of both efforts and a unified portal has been created. This paper integrates the above two workflows and portals into a single platform. It illustrates the need for such integration for users with similar (but not same) goals and describes how to partition users among different groups with different access rights to ensure security within subgroups. Such a system can easily integrate future UCoMS sub-projects into a unified whole. Hence, our portal prototype serves as a good example of the benefit that may accrue from integrated workflows.