Following successful logon you will be taken to your homepage. This page contains five panels: Help, Parameterized Workflows, Webstart Applications,
Administration and Current Jobs, all of which are detailed below.
If you are new to Astrogrid it may be well worth familiarizing yourself with the help pages; contains links to Sciences Services, Portal Usage and a Cook-book.
As already mentioned in the introduction Astrogrid uses workflow to do astronomy - designing and building your own workflows can initially seem complex. With parameterized workflows all the complex work of designing the workflow has already been carried out for you! Simply choose the parameterized workflow you are interested in from a list, enter the requested parameter values, and hit 'Execute' (at ths point you can also choose to save a copy of the workflow to your MySpace, if you have ticked the checkbox the MySpace microbrowser will appear when you hit Execute). Astrogrid will create the workkflow document for you, submit it to the Job Entry System (JES) and display the unique Job ID of your workflow so that you can track it's status from either your homepage (current jobs panel) or the Jobs page. From either or these pages an individual workflow can be looked at in greater detail by clicking it's Job ID.
Astrogrid includes a number of applications that download and run using Java Web Start (if your browser gives an error similar to 'The file "astrogrid-desktop.jnlp" is of type
application/x-java-jnlp-file and does not know how to handle this file type' you will need to download Java Webstart - version 1.5.0 is included in the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5.0.)
All Astrogrid webstart applications contain a security certificate - you will be asked if you trust each signed application before it will downlaod. The Webstart Application panel
contains links to websites detailing the usage of each of the application.
The workbench provides a series of simple GUIs for the core features of astrogrid - myspace browser, job controller, registry browser. You will be required to log on once to use the features of Workbench.
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized images of any part of the sky, to superimpose entries from astronomical catalogs or personal user data files (e.g. from your MySpace)....
Details of any planned outages of the Astrogrid system will be displayed here.
You can change your password, and will eventually be able to personalize your Astrogrid portal, from here.
This panel displays details of jobs you have recently submitted to the Job Entry System, meaning that as soon as you log in you can review the status of any of your workflows. The Job ID acts as a link so that a particular workflow can be looked at in detail. Note: the homepage is set to refresh automatically every 20 seconds to ensure that the 'Current Jobs' list is constantly kept upto date.
User's Guide
Installer's Guide
Developer's Guide