The Grid Application Toolkit: Toward Generic and Easy Application Programming Interfaces for the Grid
Allen, G.
Davis, K.
Goodale, T.
Hutanu, A.
Kaiser, H.
Kielmann, T.
Merzky, A.
van Nieuwpoort, R.
Reinefeld, A.
Schintke, F.
Schott, T.
Seidel, E.
Ullmer, B.
Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge, LA, USA;
This paper appears in: Proceedings of the IEEE
Publication Date: March 2005
Volume: 93,
Issue: 3
On page(s): 534-550
ISSN: 0018-9219
INSPEC Accession Number: 8312736
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2004.842755
Current Version Published: 2005-02-28
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Core Grid technologies are rapidly maturing, but there remains a shortage of real Grid applications. One important reason is the lack of a simple and high-level application programming toolkit, bridging the gap between existing Grid middleware and application-level needs. The Grid Application Toolkit (GAT), as currently developed by the EC-funded project GridLab, provides this missing functionality. As seen from the application, the GAT provides a unified simple programming interface to the Grid infrastructure, tailored to the needs of Grid application programmers and users. A uniform programming interface will be needed for application developers to create a new generation of "Grid-aware" applications. The GAT implementation handles both the complexity and the variety of existing Grid middleware services via so-called adaptors. Complementing existing Grid middleware, GridLab also provides high-level services to implement the GAT functionality. We present the GridLab software architecture, consisting of the GAT, environment-specific adaptors, and GridLab services. We elaborate the concepts underlying the GAT and outline the corresponding application programming interface. We present the functionality of GridLab's high-level services and demonstrate how a dynamic Grid application can easily benefit from the GAT. All GridLab software is open source and can be downloaded from the project Web site.
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