Using grid computing based components in on demand environmental data delivery

The grid computing technology is evolving from the emergence to the stable and production status. In the computational science field the grid computing approach for storage and computing element resource sharing is a common way thanks to middleware as the Globus Toolkit and grid environments as the Condor project. In many domain applications, as environmental science, bioinformatics and interactive multimedia delivery, the shared resource is composed by tagged data and contents instead of hardware components. We provide a grid aware component leveraging on our Resource Broker Service implementing a wrap over the world-wide spread OpenDAP scientific data access protocol, ensuring effective and efficient grid based content distribution, and contributing to the "grand challenge" concerning the development of grid-aware software infrastructure for data intensive environmental applications.