pyGlobus: a Python interface to the Globus Toolkit™

Developing high‐performance, problem‐solving environments/applications that allow scientists to easily harness the power of the emerging national‐scale ‘Grid’ infrastructure is currently a difficult task. Although many of the necessary low‐level services, e.g. security, resource discovery, remote access to computation/data resource, etc., are available, it can be a challenge to rapidly integrate them into a new application. To address this difficulty we have begun the development of a Python‐based high‐level interface to the Grid services provided by the Globus Toolkit. In this paper we will explain why rapid application development using Grid services is important, look briefly at a motivating example, and finally look at the design and implementation of the pyGlobus package.