Facilitating User Access to the Grid: A Lightweight Application Hosting Environment for Grid Enabled Computational Science

While great strides have been made in the field of grid middleware technology, difficulties deploying and configuring current grid middleware technologies from an end user perspective have led to many of the people who would benefit most from the technology, namely application scientists, to avoid using it. In response to this we have developed the Application Hosting Environment (AHE), a lightweight, easily deployable environment designed to simplify the way the scientist interacts with the grid. The AHE builds a layer of middleware on top of existing technologies such as Globus, abstracting the details of the particular underlying grid middleware in use. The functionality of the AHE is exposed as web services using the WSRF::Lite toolkit; the user interacts with these services to launch and monitor applications. The resulting system provides a great deal of flexibility, allowing clients to be developed for a range of devices from PDAs to desktop machines, and command line clients which can be scripted to produce complicated application workflows.