GriDE: A Grid-Enabled Development Environment

Abstract

Computational grids have become an important emerging platform for high-performance and resource consuming scientific computing. However, there are still obstacles for potential grid users to be involved into the trend and the grid application development is far from mature. Few applications have been designed for and hence benefit from the grids. This is largely due to the immature enabling grid computing environment/tools.While the traditional established programming tools can possibly be used to build grid applications, they are not particularly suitable for the nature of the grid environment. Our GriDE project aims to provide the fundamentally required features for grid application development and hence narrow the gap between applications and grid computing facilities. We present an overview architecture of GriDE, an application development oriented environment and the integrated basic functionalities such as grid job submission, grid resource discovery/browsing, job status monitoring, and preliminary grid workflow editing. Our experience of GriDE environment shows the feasibility of creating a easy-to-use computing environment for development and execution of grid applications.