Development of Web toolkits for computational science portals: the NPACI HotPage

The NPACI (National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure) HotPage is a user portal that provides views of a distributed set of high-performance computing (HPC) resources as either an integrated meta-system or as individual machines. These Web pages run on any Web browser, regardless of the system or geographical location, and are supported by secure, encrypted log-in sessions where authenticated users can access their HPC system accounts and perform basic computational tasks. We describe the development of the Grid Portals Toolkit (GridPort), which is based on the architecture developed for the HotPage, and provide computational scientists and application developers with a set of simple, modular services and tools that allow application-level, customized science portal development and that facilitate seamless Web-based access to distributed computational resources and Grid services.