Computational Grid technologies hold the promise of providing global scale distributed computing for scientific applications. The goal of projects such as Globus [1], Legion [2], Condor [3], and others is to provide some portion of the infrastructure needed to support ubiquitous, geographically distributed computing [4, 5]. These metacomputing tools provide such services as high-throughput computing, single login to resources distributed across multiple organizations, and common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and protocols for information, job submission, and security services across multiple organizations. . | 30 Distributed object-based Grid computing environments Tomasz Haupt1 and Marlon E. Pierce2 Mississippi State University Starkville Mississippi United States Indiana University Bloomington Indiana United States INTRODUCTION Computational Grid technologies hold the promise of providing global scale distributed computing for scientific applications. The goal of projects such as Globus 1 Legion 2 Condor 3 and others is to provide some portion of the infrastructure needed to support ubiquitous geographically distributed computing 4 5 . These metacomputing tools provide such services as high-throughput computing single login to resources distributed across multiple organizations and common Application Programming Interfaces APIs and protocols for information job submission and security services across multiple organizations. This collection of services forms the backbone of what is popularly known as the computational Grid or just the Grid. The service-oriented architecture of the Grid with its complex client tools and programming interfaces is difficult to use for the application developers and end users. The perception of complexity of the Grid environment comes from the fact that often Grid Grid Computing - Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality. Edited by F. Berman A. Hey and G. Fox 2003 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBN 0-470-85319-0 714 TOMASZ HAUPT AND MARLON E. PIERCE services address issues at levels that are too low for the application developers in terms of API and protocol stacks . Consequently there are not many Grid-enabled applications and in general the Grid adoption rate among the end users is low. By way of contrast industry has undertaken enormous efforts to develop easy user interfaces that hide the complexity of underlying systems. Through Web portals the user has access to a wide variety of services such as weather forecasts stock market quotes and online trading calendars e-mail auctions air travel reservations and ticket purchasing and many .
