Commodity Grid Kits – Middleware for Building Grid Computing Environments

Abstract

Recent Grid projects, such as the Globus Project, provide a set of useful services such as authentication and remote access to resources, and information services to discover and query such remote resources. Unfortunately, these services may not be compatible with the commodity technologies used for application development by the software engineers and scientists. Instead, users may prefer accessing the Grid from a higher level of abstraction than what such toolkits provide. To bridge this gap, Commodity Grid (CoG) Kits provide the middleware for accessing the functionality of the Grid from a variety of commodity technologies, frameworks, and languages. It is important to recognize that these Commodity Grid Kits not only provide an interface to existing Grid technologies, but also bring Grid programming to a new level by leveraging the methodologies of the chosen commodity technology, thus helping the development of the next generation of Grid services. Based on these Commodity Grid Toolkits, a variety of higher level Grid services are far easier to design, maintain, and deploy. Several projects have successfully demonstrated the use of Commodity Grid Kits for the design of advanced Grid Services and Grid Computing Environments.

Wrap Scientific Applications as WSRF Grid Services Using gRAVI

“…Even within the Grid world the idea has been previously explored, the java COG kit [3] provided a primitive way to create services using service map files but this technique is not flexible and lacks scheduling, data management, and security mechanisms. Soaplab [4] uses a set of generic Web services to access applications on remote machines.…”

Credentials Management for Authentication in a Grid-Based E-Learning Platform

“…The architecture of the Grid-based e-learning platform (presented in Figure 1 The access to the Grid services is accomplished using Java Commodity Grid (CoG) Kit [10], [11] that provides the basic APIs to the Grid to allow access to GridFTP servers, the classic GRAM services, a complete implementation of GSI and MyProxy client libraries. Java Cog Kit allows Grid users, Grid application developers, and Grid administrators to use, program, and administer Grids from a higher-level framework.…”

Overview of Grid Computing Environments

“…Refs. [6,14,15,27] and [44] describe respectively Java, CORBA, Python and Perl Commodity Grid interfaces to the Globus toolkit. These provide the basic building blocks of full GCE's.…”

“…This document summarizes the current status of Grid Computing Environments. It integrates 15 chapters [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52] of a recent book [37] with a survey [36,38] of a set of 29 papers gathered together by the GCE (Grid Computing Environment) research group [55] of the Global Grid Forum (GGF), which was published in 2002 as a special issue of the journal Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience [54]. The Grid is rapidly evolving in both concept and implementation and there is a corresponding excitement and confusion as to the "right" way to think about Grid systems.…”