From campus resources to federated international grids

Key to broadening participation in grid computing is the provision of easy to use access mechanisms and user interfaces, to allow a wide range of users with different skill sets to access the computational and data resources on offer. The Application Hosting Environment is one such middleware tool, hiding much of the complexity of dealing with grid resources from the user, and allowing them to interact with applications rather than machines. The nature of AHE means that it can be used as a single interface to a wide variety of resources, ranging from those provided at a departmental or institutional level to international federated grids of supercomputers. The number, range and size of resources made available by federating grids makes possible scientific investigations that would previously not have been feasible. In this paper we describe how we have deployed AHE to offer access to federated local and grid resources provided by the TeraGrid, UK National Grid Service and EU DEISA grid. We also present two case studies where AHE has been used to facilitate production level scientific simulation across these resources.