The Cloud phenomenon is quickly growing towards becoming the de facto standard of Internet Computing, storage and hosting both in industry and academia. The large scalability possibilities offered by Cloud platforms can be harnessed not only for services and applications hosting but also as a raw on-demand computing resource. This paper proposes the use of a Cloud system as a raw computational on-demand resource for a Grid middleware. We illustrate a proof of concept by considering the DIET-Solve Grid middleware and the EUCALYPTUS open-source Cloud platform.

Among existing grid middleware approaches, one simple, powerful, and flexible approach consists of using servers available in different administrative domains through the classic client-server or remote procedure call paradigm. Network Enabled Servers (NES) implement this model, also called GridRPC. Clients submit computation requests to a scheduler, whose goal is to find a server available on the grid using some performance metric. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of a NES middleware developed in the GRAAL team called distributed interactive engineering toolbox (DIET) and to describe recent developments around plug-in schedulers, workflow management, and tools. DIET is a hierarchical set of components used for the development of applications based on computational servers on the grid.Clients submit computation requests to a scheduler, which locates one or more servers available on the grid. Scheduling is frequently applied to balance the work among the servers and a list of available servers is sent back to the client; the client is then able to send the data and the request to one of the suggested servers to solve its problem. Thanks to the growth of network bandwidth and the reduction of network latency, relatively small computation requests can now be sent to servers available on the grid. To make effective use of today's scalable resource platforms, it is important to ensure scalability in the middleware layers.The distributed interactive engineering toolbox (DIET) [2,3] project is focused on the development of a scalable middleware, with initial efforts focused on distributing the scheduling problem across multiple agents. DIET consists of a set of elements that can be used together to build applications using the GridRPC paradigm. This middleware is able to find an appropriate server according to the information given in the client's request (e.g. problem to be solved, size of the data involved), the performance of the target platform (e.g. server load, available memory, communication performance), and the local availability of data stored during previous computations. The scheduler is distributed using several collaborating hierarchies connected either statically or dynamically (in a peer-to-peer fashion). Data management is provided to allow persistent data to stay within the system for future re-use. This feature avoids unnecessary communication when dependencies exist between different requests (e.g. same or different requests using same data will be executed on the same server). Servers have the possibility of launching several tasks either in a time-shared manner or sequentially, making servers buffer some work, with a parameter defined as the number of concurrent jobs at a given moment on a given server [4].Several other network enabled server (NES) systems have been developed in the past [5,6]. Among them, NetSolve [7], Ninf [8], and OmniRPC [9] have particularly pursued research involving the GridRPC paradigm [1]. NetSolve, developed at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, allows th...

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