Services and applications today are increasingly collaborative and multidisciplinary, and it is not unusual for teams to span institutions, states, countries and continents. Grid technologies seek in a flexible and controlled way to link data, computers and resources into a single virtual organization by providing the protocols and services.

The gridify is an application integration environment that enables the implementation and configuration of composite services requiring the use of substantial computer and data resources. Coupled with networks of computers, it provides the necessary flexibility for the integration of applications (without any re-engineering or source code access) with work-flows, data access and computer or storage resources. Its modular nature provide the tools and methods for capture, manage, process, store, preserve and deliver content across a community of users.

On the other hand, gridify enables the large-scale aggregation and sharing of computational, data and other resources intra or across institutional boundaries providing an off-the-shelf solution for the installation of a private local computing GRID and execution of services and applications

The gridify product builds on the heritage of the European Space Agency (ESA) GRID Processing on-Demand infrastructure (G-POD) (available at http://eogrid.esrin.esa.int/) developed and maintained by Terradue Srl as an European Space Agency's incubated spin-off.

Through the incubation process Terradue Srl pushed the development of gridify into a generic product enlarging its use beyond the Earth observation applications and services. The product is focused for two main usages:

• An off-the-shelf solution for a seamless implementation and support of high performance computing architectures for industries or a research facilities with intensive services and applications
• An interoperable connectivity with external shared resources promoting collaboration and developing bridges between the Industry/Research institutions to share mutual and dynamically available resources for institutions with low computational and storage resources with a sporadic need to run demanding services and applications.

The gridify web portal is capable of managing users account and files, applications and services, instantiating and scheduling tasks, submiting and retrieving status query of tasks on different grid infrastructures and middlewares.

Working together with an abstraction layer it builds a reusable framework taking seamless care of the data housekeeping and basic work-flow processing tasks recurrent to most data processing applications. The creation and connection to secure grid sessions, file registry and retrieval, job submission together with session and job status are included among these capabilities. All the necessary grid operations performed in all phases, such as applications and data files transfer, grid job status, exception and error management were virtualized to different grid middlewares.


For some examples of portals built using gridify check this entry.