Designing Grid-based problem solving environments and portals

Building problem solving environments in the emerging national-scale Computational Grid infrastructure is a challenging task. Accessing advanced Grid services, such as authentication, remote access to computers, resource management, and directory services, is usually not a simple matter for problem solving environment developers. 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 the Grid and particular commodity frameworks familiar to problem solving environment developers. We explain why CoG Kits are important for problem solving environment developers, 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.