VLAB: Web services, portlets, and workflows for enabling cyber-infrastructure in computational mineral physics

Virtual organizations are rapidly changing the way scientific communities perform research. Web-based portals, environments designed for collaboration and sharing data, have now become the nexus of distributed high performance computing. Within this paper, we address the infrastructure of the Virtual Laboratory for Earth and Planetary Materials (VLab), an organization dedicated to using quantum calculations to solve problems in mineral physics. VLab provides a front-end portal, accessible from a browser, for scientists to submit large-scale simulations and interactively analyze their results. The cyber-infrastructure of VLab concentrates on scientific workflows, portal development, responsive user-interfaces and automatic generation of web services, all necessary to ensure a maximum degree of flexibility and ease of use for both the expert scientist and the layperson.