Lessons Learned from the GECEM Project

The Grid-Enabled Computational Electromagnetics project (GECEM) has developed a portal for performing electromagnetics simulations. The portal is based on the GridSphere portal framework and uses JSR168compliant portlets to access remote web services. The GECEM portal supports an execution pipeline that starts with an input geometry which is processed to generate surface and volume computational meshes, which in turn are input to a computational electromagnetics (CEM) simulation. The CEM simulation produces the final output file which consists of a vector of values at each mesh point. A distributed collaborative visualization tool has been integrated into the portal to view the CEM simulation results. This paper discusses how the GECEM portal can be extended into a more general portal for a certain class of scientific computation. A model of a scientific portal will be presented in which abstract workflows are built out of workflow patterns. The resulting workflows are then embedded into the portal for use by end-users. A virtualized data store may be used to support checkpointing and archiving.