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

Abstract

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 [1], 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.

Persistent Fault-Tolerance for Divide-and-Conquer Applications on the Grid

“…In fact, the user may specify an arbitrary location for the checkpoint file. Access to the checkpoint file is implemented using the Java implementation of the Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) [5]. The GAT provides transparent access to various grid middleware systems.…”

Generic application description model: toward automatic deployment of applications on computational grids

“…Condor-G [14] and GridLab's GAT 3 [3] manage the whole process of remote job submission to various queuing systems (e.g., PBS, LSF, Sun Grid Engine, etc.) They provide a matchmaking [27] feature to place executables on resources, and launch those executables on the selected remote resources.…”

Dynamic Instrumentation, Performance Monitoring and Analysis of Grid Scientific Workflows

“…We also focus on fork-join structures that contain structured block of activities. A structured block is a single-entry-single-exit block of activities 3 . For example, Figure 5(c) presents structured blocks of activities.…”

“…To achieve that aim, it is necessary to provide well-defined interfaces to access these resources and services by hiding their specific features. The Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) [3] presents a high level application programming that shields low level details of underlying Grid sites from the user. The Grid dynamic instrumentation service and GAT follow the same general approach: using well-defined service interface to hide low level details of Grids.…”