Grid Portal Design and Usability Evaluation

Grid technology utilizes and manages the distributed computing infrastructure. The distributed resources appear to end-users as a single virtual environment. Currently, there are a wide variety of researches based on grid, from both academia and industries over the world. However, most grid platforms are usually based on UNIX. Thus, the users can interact with a grid system mainly through a set of complex command line interfaces. The complexity of such command lines can be potential problems for non-UNIX users as they are not familiar with text-mode commands. Grid portal is a web-based application that provides various services for grid resources access. It simplifies the interface to grid infrastructures by providing users with a customized view of resources at both the software and the hardware levels. In our work, we designed and implemented the grid portal. The users´ satisfactions on using the portal are also evaluated using the analysis of variance technique. The results indicated that our portal design is suitable for grid novice users