gUSE (grid and cloud User Support Environment) is a well-known and permanently improving open source DCI (Distributed Computing Infrastructure) gateway framework developed by the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS). It enables users the convenient and easy access to grid and cloud infrastructures and gUSE is the most visited European workflow system as per statistics of EGI (European Grid Infrastructure) Application Database.

The WS-PGRADE portal provides the high-level representation of the gUSE system. This portal is the graphical user interface of the gUSE/WS-PGRADE framework. This is the second generation P-GRADE portal (P-GRADE is the first grid-based graphical development and visualization tool from LPDS) that introduces many advanced features both at the workflow and architecture level compared to the first generation P-GRADE portal.

WS-PGRADE supports the simple development and fast submission of distributed applications executed on the computational resources of various DCIs including clusters, service grids (ARC, gLite, Globus, UNICORE), BOINC desktop grids, clouds (via CloudBroker Platform and Google App Engine).

The WS-PGRADE Portal’s speciality is to provide a comprehensive workflow-oriented framework that enables the development, execution and monitoring of scientific workflows and also the nodes of these workflows can have access to a large variety of different DCIs including clusters, grids, desktop grids and clouds. 

Another important feature of the Portal framework is that it can be easily adapted and customized according to the special needs of various user communities in order to develop their application-specific science gateways. The reason why scientific user communities likely select this portal is its very flexible workflow system, easy-to-use user interface and its capability of submitting and managing these workflows on a large variety of different DCIs.