A Java commodity grid kit

Developing advanced applications for the emerging national-scale 'Computati onal Grid' infrastructures is still a difficult task. Although Grid service s are available that assist the application developers in authentication, r emote access to computers, resource management, and infrastructure discover y, they provide a challenge because these services may not be compatible wi th the commodity distributed-computing technologies and frameworks used pre viously. The Commodity Grid project is working to overcome this difficulty by creati ng what we call Commodity Grid Toolkits (CoG Kits) that define mappings and interfaces between Grid and particular commodity frameworks, In this paper , we explain why CoG Kits are important, describe the design and implementa tion of a Java CoG Kit, and use examples to illustrate how CoG Kits can ena ble new approaches to application development based on the integrated use o f commodity and Grid technologies, Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Lt d.