The GrADS project: Software support for high-level grid application development

Advances in networking technologies will soon make it possible to use the g lobal information infrastructure in a qualitatively different way-as a comp utational as well as an information resource. As described in the recent bo ok The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, this Grid will c onnect the nation's computers, databases, instruments, and people in a seam less web of computing and distributed intelligence, which can be used in an on demand fashion as a problem-solving resource in many fields of human en deavor-and, in particular, science and engineering. The availability of gri d resources will give rise to dramatically new classes of applications, in which computing resources are no longer localized but, rather, distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic; computation is increasingly sophisticated and multidisciplinary; and computation is integrated into our daily lives and, hence, subject to stricter time constraints than at present. The impact of these new applications will be pervasive, ranging from new systems for scie ntific inquiry, through computing support for crisis management, to the use of ambient computing to enhance personal mobile computing environments. To realize this vision, significant scientific and technical obstacles must b e overcome. Principal among these is usability. The goal of the Grid Applic ation Development Software (GrADS) project is to simplify distributed heter ogeneous computing in the same way that the World Wide Web simplified infor mation sharing over the Internet. To that end, the project is exploring the scientific and technical problems that must be solved to make it easier fo r ordinary scientific users to develop, execute, and tune applications on t he Grid. In this paper, the authors describe the vision and strategies unde rlying the GrADS project, including the base software architecture for grid execution and performance monitoring, strategies and tools for constructio n of applications from libraries of grid-aware components, and development of innovative new science and engineering applications that can exploit the se new technologies to run effectively in grid environments.