The Grid Application Toolkit: Toward Generic and Easy Application Programming Interfaces for the Grid

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.