A web-based utility for Grid data management

Large Grid infrastructures deploying the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) software release are currently used by many scientific communities that take advantage of  the available distributed compute and storage resources. However, the exploitation of Grid services by new users, especially those belonging to small communities (often with no grid skills)  is not very easy due to the difficulty of handling X.509 digital certificates and to the complexity of the job submission and data management tasks. 
In order to hide this complexity, the Italian Grid Initiative (IGI), that operates the Italian Grid infrastructure, has developed a web-based portal that provides users with several important services such as job submission, workflow definition and  data management..
This paper describes the portal’s data management component that allows authorized users to easily manage their data by means of  very simple operations within the portal. The IGI portal allows users  to upload and download files on the Grid, browse Grid file catalogs, replicate data on specific storage elements, manage file privileges and some other basic operations.
The architecture of the Data Management component is such that it does not on the portal’s efficiency, so that the portal is not a bottleneck when  large or many concurrent data transfers occur. This solution consists of  a service, the Data Mover, that manages data transfers by means of  a dedicated storage infrastructure acting as a cache. Users can easily upload data from their desktops/laptops through the portal’s web interface; the  the Data Mover then  asynchronously copies them to the desired Storage Element and registers theme into the appropriate grid catalog,  hiding the Grid middleware complexity to the end user. The structure of this component is modular in order to have the possibility to easily add new features.