As a joint effort with the partner project "Chemistry - Grid integration" the goals originally set, including some additions like process automatisation, will be reached during this extension.

See also Swiss Grid Portal and Chemistry - Grid integration.

Results

Scientists are given an intuitive and easy to use web portal to perform large computer simulations and to analyze large volumes of digital data.
The developed portal for biologists researching proteins for example allows them to analyze their data with just a few clicks in an automated fashion using the university central computer cluster and the Swiss Grid infrastructure without the need for expert knowledge how to do that in detail.
They can simply log into the portal with their regular university account and access to the necessary resources for their analysis.
They can define complex automated analysis workflows, reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks as well as the risk of making mistakes in an otherwise tedious manual process. Tools have been developed that can be used by researchers in computational chemistry to make use of the computers in the Swiss Grid infrastructure just as easily.

The portal at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology - IMSB in Zurich is in full production and is being used increasingly by the researchers. The chemistry tools are in use at the University of Zurich.
The communities that work on proteomics in Geneva and Zurich have been brought together.
A final step will be to create and validate a workflow inside the P-Grade portal for the integration of an Open Modification Search tool (QuickMod).

During the projects Swiss Grid Portal and Chemistry - Grid Integration it became evident that the two user communities have a very different set of requirements on a user interface or portal solution. While the computational chemists want to have a considerable amount of control over how the computation is done, the biologists only want to see a high level interface with easy interaction. Therefore two separate solutions for the two user communities were developed.

Goals

In addition to the originally set goals, we would like to provide a library that can be used to automate the process of certification of the AAI-authenticated user so that submission to the SMSCG Grid works seamlessly. The integration is technically ready but actually too complex to be used by the end-users.
The existing ARC-JOpera adapter will be extended to obtain credentials through the AAI/PKI security delegation library and we will use them to submit jobs to ARC. This will greatly improve the security of the current solution, which either assumes that the Grid certificates have been obtained through an out-of-band channel or that the user's Shibboleth's password is entrusted to the JOpera workflow engine.

To support the growing local Grid user community at USI, we also plan to devote extra effort to perform an additional portal deployment on a USI Shib-enabled server. This deployment will allow the Swiss Grid Portal project to validate the reproducibility of its results and the completeness of the produced documentation and training material.

Steps

1. Security:
   Provide a reusable library module that can be integrated both with P-Grade and JOpera (and therefore also with other web-based applications) (additional time in streamlining the configuration and installation must be spent)
2. Proteomics Portal:
   Add enhancements; assure proper integration and readiness for end-users; proper roll out of the solution and instruction of users.
3. Computational Science Portal:
   Evaluate and test software packages, procedures, documentation and training material with an additional deployment to ensure reproducibility of results and integration with computational science applications and tools.