An object-oriented view of grid computing technologies to abstract remote task execution

With the advent of grid technologies, much interest has arisen in the application of these computational techniques to multiple fields. However, grid computing technologies have a steep learning curve that tends to discourage scientists from the usage of grid facilities applied to their research, preventing a widespread adoption of grid computing. In this paper, we describe a Java-based middleware, built on top of the Java commodity grid, that offers an object oriented, user-friendly view of the grid, which hides much of the underlying complexity when using the grid computing services provided by the Globus Toolkit. The middleware developed is focused on achieving remote execution of tasks, providing automatic file staging services, parallel execution in multiprocessor machines and fault-tolerant scheduling capabilities, from a simple and intuitive application programming interface.