A Grid Enabled Liquid Crystal Structure Modelling and Visualization Web Portal

This paper describes a prototype computational Web Portal for modelling liquid crystals structures. The liquid crystal (LC) Web portal is implemented using a multitiered system architecture. The client Web browser uses a mixture of Web technologies that allows the user to manipulate and change the simulation and the visualization parameters. The middle-tier of the Portal provides core services such as processing requests, dynamically generating responses, and maintaining the states of the LC computation as well as the system. The Portal back-end uses Globus services to securely access and manage distributed computation and data resources. The LC Web portal extends a users’ desktop by providing seamless and secure access to remote computational resources and a simply and easy to use interface to manipulate, modify, stage, and visualize complex liquid crystal simulations. Abstract..................................................................................................................... 1