Security and history management: Improvements to PBSWeb

The resource managers (e.g., Batch queue schedulers) used at many parallel and distributed computing centers can be complicated systems for the average user. A large number of command-line options, environment variables, and site-specific configuration parameters can be overwhelming. Therefore, we have developed a simple web-based interface, called pbsweb, to the portable batch system (pbs), which is our local resource manager system. By using a web browser and server software infrastructure, pbsweb supports both local and remote users, maintains a history of past job parameters, and hides much of the complexities of the underlying scheduler. The architecture and implementation techniques used in pbsweb can be applied to other resource managers. Since our first description of the pbsweb project (Glover F. 1990), we have completely re-implemented the system to address three important deficiencies: (a) Instead of using the filesystem to manage job histories, we are now using the postgresql relational dbms to improve history queries and reliability. (b) Instead of clear text socket connections, we are using the apache web server with secure socket layer to improve the security of communications between browser and server. (c) Instead of using perl and raw html documents, we are using the php server-side scripting language to access the postgresql database, to manage user sessions, and to create dynamic web pages. (d) We describe the security and history management benefits of the new pbsweb.