User centric monitoring (UCM) information service for the next generation of Grid-enabled scientists
D. M. Alexander, C Li, J. Lauret, Valery Fine · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2008
Nuclear and high-energy physicists routinely execute data processing and data analysis jobs on a Grid and need to be able to easily and remotely monitor the execution of these jobs. Existing Grid monitoring tools provide abundant information about the whole system, but are geared towards production jobs and well suited for Grid administrators, while the information tailored towards an individual user is not readily available in a user-friendly and user-centric way. Such User Centric information includes monitoring information such as the status of the submitted job, queue position, time of the start/finish, percentage of being done, error messages, standard output, and reasons for failure. We proposed to develop a framework based on Grid service technology that allows scientists to track and monitor their jobs easily from a user-centric view. The proposed framework aims to be flexible so that it can be applied by any Grid Virtual Organization (VO) with various ways of collecting the user-centric job monitoring information built into the framework. Furthermore, the framework provides a rich and reusable set of methods of presenting the information to the user from within a Web browser and other clients. In this presentation, we will give an architectural overview of the UCM service, show an example implementation in the RHIC/STAR experiment context and discuss limitations and future collaborative work.