This paper describes the requirements, design and implementation progress of an e-Science environment to enable rapid evaluation of potential uses of NASA research products and technologies to improve future operational systems for societal benefits. This project is intended to be a low-cost effort focused on integrating existing open source, public domain, and/or community developed software components and tools. Critical for success is a carefully designed implementation plan allowing for incremental enhancement of the scale and functionality of the system while maintaining an operational the system and hardening its implementation. This has been achieved by rigorously following the principles of separation of concerns, loose coupling, and service oriented architectures employing Portlet (GridSphere), Service Bus (ServiceMix), and Grid (Globus) technologies, as well as introducing a new layer on top of the THREDDS data server. At the current phase, the system provide data access through a data explorer allowing the user to view the metadata and provenance of the datasets, invoke data transformations such as subsampling, reprojections, format translations, and de-clouding of selected data sets or collections, as well as generate simulated data sets approximating data feed from future NASA missions.

Abstract Vertical Grid portals, or Vortals, proved to be useful by providing access to applications running on high‐performance computational platforms and to distributed data enabling data sharing and other forms of collaboration. This paper identifies the commonalities between Vortals in various application domains, i.e. application‐independent patterns of orchestrating Grid services employed by a typical Vortal. These patterns can be captured as façades—a software layer between the Vortal business logic and generic Grid services that promotes a horizontal integration. The façades are reusable and considerably simplify the development of new Vortals. Furthermore, the façades foster interactions between different Vortals, and hence making them the cooperative Grid Vortals. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper describes the progress of developing a Grid-based system for product design optimizations to increase the engineer's productivity by saving him tedious, manual, and error-prone work of organizing, maintaining, submitting and monitoring computational workflows comprising hundreds of jobs in a heterogeneous distributed environment. The approach is that once the optimization process is interactively defined through a GUI, the process runs asynchronously, automatically, and autonomously. This goal is being achieved through horizontal integration by employing a Service Oriented Architecture. The developed cyberinfrastructure comprises a collection of Grid services that automates creation, submission and monitoring of jobs. In addition, support is provided for accessing information needed to identify the reasons of failures, should any occur, The front end of the system augments a commercial, state-of-the-art user graphical interface (Abacus CAE) for defining a finite element analysis problem with custom GUI components for specifying the optimization problem and providing access to remote resources. The access to remote resources is achieved by embedding clients of Grid services in the Abacus CAE.