A Java commodity grid kit.

Developing advanced applications for the emerging national-scale ‘Computational Grid’ infrastructures is still a difficult task. Although Grid services are available that assist the application developers in authentication, remote access to computers, resource management, and infrastructure discovery, they provide a challenge because these services may not be compatible with the commodity distributed-computing technologies and frameworks used previously. The Commodity Grid project is working to overcome this difficulty by creating what we call Commodity Grid Toolkits (CoG Kits) that define mappings and interfaces between Grid and particular commodity frameworks. In this paper, we explain why CoG Kits are important, describe the design and implementation of a Java CoG Kit, and use examples to illustrate how CoG Kits can enable new approaches to application development based on the integrated use of commodity and Grid technologies. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]