Grid Enabled Desktop Environments (GRENADE)
Contents
Overview
The marriage of genuine requirements in the realms of computational and experimental science with methodologies developed in the realm of computer science has lead to the emergence of the computational Grid. If the Grid is ever to deliver its promised ubiquity, it must be made accessible to a much wider community than that which gave it birth. Key to this are appropriate, friendly user interfaces, accessible in the user's natural environment.
The Grid-Enabled Desktop Environments (GRENADE) project is exploring the impact of Grid computing on the desktop metaphor. By tight integration of Grid capabilities within the user's desktop, GRENADE hopes to improve the usability and visibility of the Grid.
The GRENADE project is completing the development of a prototype Grid-Enabled Desktop Environment based on Globus, KDE, and Qt, in order to pump prime a (hopefully) self-sustaining open source project.
Software
Two GRENADE components have been released as version 1.1 of GRENADE. They are available for download under version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
The job management bundle provides a simple job editor, support for drag-and-drop job submission, job monitoring and management.
Download GRENADE 1.1 Job Controller (gzip compressed tarball, 645 kB)
- The gsiftp bundle provides a kio-slave that supports the GridFTP protocol, enabling Konqueror (and other KDE components) to handle URLs starting with gsiftp://.
Download GRENADE 1.1.2 kio-slave for GridFTP (gzip compressed tarball, 910 kB. February 2006 bugfix and feature extension release!)
- GRENADE 1.0 is no longer supported, nor available for download.
Publications
Martyn Foster, Daniel Hanlon, Jon MacLaren, James Marsh, Stephen Pettifer and Stephen Pickles, Grid Enabled Desktop Environments, Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Nottingham, September 2004. The paper, in PDF format, is available here.
James Marsh, Steve Pettifer, Daniel Hanlon, Stephen Pickles, Jon MacLaren, Martyn Foster, GRENADE: A Grid Enabled Desktop Environment, 13th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies (WETICE 2004), Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, 14-16 June 2004, Modena, Italy. IEEE Computer Society 2004, ISBN 0-7695-2183-5, pp343-344.
Stephen Pickles, Martyn Foster, Jon MacLaren, James Marsh and Stephen Pettifer, Grid Enabled Desktop Environments: The GRENADE Project, Proceedings of the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Nottingham, September 2003. The paper, in PDF format, is available here.
Other Resources
A presentation given at the Portals and Portlets Workshop, NeSC, 16 July 2003
A presentation on GRENADE given at the ESNW review, 27 March 2003
Subscribe to the GRENADE mailing list here.
Some confidential design documents are available here (username/password required).
Partners
The GRENADE project is a partnership between Manchester Computing, the Advanced Interfaces Group in the School of Computer Science, and SGI. It is funded by SGI and the Department of Trade and Industry through E-Science North West (ESNW).