2008 Designing and Developing a Portal for the Polar Grid High Performance Computing System at Elizabeth City State University
http://nia.ecsu.edu/ureomps2008/team-portal/index.html

Polar Grid is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program funded partnership of Indiana University (IU) and Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) to acquire and deploy the computing infrastructure needed to investigate the urgent problems in glacial melting. The grid will be comprised of ruggedized laptops and computer clusters deployed in the field in the Polar Regions and two large scale computing clusters for detailed analysis in the U.S. – one to be installed at IU, and the other at ECSU. This installation will give ECSU a 5 Teraflop MSI High performance computing system, building on its distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure to create tremendous outreach capabilities.

Accessing this computing cluster will entail the development of a grid portal to provide security, access to data, and the ability to process data along with education and outreach functions. Development of this portal will start with the documentation of terms, processes and software needed to develop a portal and understand what the grid is. The project will then progress to producing XML page structures to display processed data acquired during expeditions in Greenland and Antarctica. Another aspect will be the development of “IGoogle Gadgets” simulating the portal user environment and the process of converting that gadget into an RSS feed.

2007 Creation of a Flexible and Scalable Distributed Computing Infrastructure using OpenGrid Project Standarts
http://nia.ecsu.edu/ureoms2007/teams/grid/index1.html

The focus of the ECSU TeraGRID team for the Summer of 2007 is to setup a documentation platform for a Condor-based GRID to be established at Elizabeth City State University. This documentation platform will be a Linux based web sever that will utilize Web 2.0 standards to create a virtual documentation web portal. Grid computing itself is the creation of a "virtual supercomputer" by using a network of geographically dispersed computers. In order to create such a network infrastructure, documentation is critical to communicate with the users, and the maintainers of the systems.

The web server will utilize an Ubuntu Linux kernel with an Apache web server, a MySQL Database, a PHP scripting package, and a Media Wiki web interface. This particular setup is called a LAMP server. LAMP is the acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP which are all open source applications. The combination of these LAMP applications allow Media Wiki to function.

Once installed, the documentation server will be utilized to first display the information on how to create the document server. The documentation server will then later be used to document how to setup a Condor-based GRID system.