The LEAD Portal: a TeraGrid gateway and application service architecture

The Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) Portal is a science application portal designed to enable effective use of Grid resources in exploring mesoscale meteorological phenomena. The aim of the LEAD Portal is to provide a more productive interface for doing experimental work by the meteorological research community, as well as bringing weather research to a wider class of users, meaning pre-college students in grades 6–12 and undergraduate college students. In this paper, we give an overview of the LEAD project and the role that LEAD portal is playing in reaching its goals. We then describe the various technologies we are using to bring powerful and complex scientific tools to educational and research users. These technologies—a fine-grained capability based authorization framework, an application service factory toolkit, and a Web services-based workflow execution engine and supporting tools—enable our team to deploy these once inaccessible, stovepipe scientific codes onto a Grid where they can be collectively utilized. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.