User Centric Monitoring

Nuclear physicists routinely execute data processing and data analysis jobs on a Grid and need to be able to monitor job execution at an arbitrary site at any time. Existing Grid monitoring tools provide abundant information about the whole system, but are geared towards production jobs and are well suited for Grid administrators, while the information tailored towards an individual user is not readily available in a user-friendly and user-centric way. This project will develop a framework ¿ composed of a library, database services, and a Web portal ¿ that will collect and filter available job-monitoring information from various resources, and present it to users in a user-centric view. Virtual organizations can use the proposed framework to provide physicists with the ability to monitor such information as the status of submitted jobs, queue positions, time of start/finish, percentage of completion, error messages, standard output, and reasons for failure. In Phase I, a working prototype of the Grid service for user-centric job monitoring was created: the basic list of job properties that users want to monitor was identified, an interface for displaying the monitored information was developed, and a prototype service was built. Phase II will build a fully functional User-Centric Monitoring (UCM) framework that will allow scientists to track jobs in a workflow through a Web portal, with more information than currently available. The UCM Framework will provide a flexible library, services, and portlets to integrate within a virtual organization¿s existing Grid systems. Monitoring properties will be stored in a database for provenance and presented through the user¿s Web browser. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The UCM framework should find use in Grid environments, where multiple users run multiple jobs and need to monitor their jobs on a per-user and per-job basis. High-energy and nuclear physics, space science, and climate modeling should greatly benefit from these tools. Also, business-to-business applications, where customers need specialized information about jobs, represents yet another market for the technology.