The Grid, a powerful, integrated computation and information resource, is being developed to connect the nation's computers, databases, instruments, and people in a seamless web that will support emerging computation-rich application concepts such as remote computing, distributed supercomputing, tele-immersion, smart instruments, and data mining. Significant technical obstacles must be overcome to achieve this vision because the Grid is inherently more complex than existing computer systems. Making Grid resources useful and accessible to scientists and engineers will require new software tools that embody major advances in both the theory and practice of building Grid applications.

Led by 12 principal investigators (PIs) from seven universities, the Grid Application Development Software (GrADS) Project was formed with the goal of simplifying distributed heterogeneous computing in the same way the World Wide Web simplified information sharing over the Internet. The PIs, many of them CRPC researchers, will following the successful distributed management model pioneered by the CRPC to explore the scientific and technical problems that must be solved to make Grid application development and performance tuning for real applications an everyday practice.

The researchers will focus on four key areas, each validated in a prototype infrastructure that will make programming on grids a routine task:

• Grid software architectures that facilitate information flow and resource negotiation among applications, libraries, compilers, linkers, and runtime systems
• Base software technologies, such as scheduling, resource discovery, and communication, to support development and execution of performance-efficient Grid applications
• Languages, compilers, environments, and tools to support creation of applications for the Grid and solution of problems on the Grid.
• Mathematical and data structure libraries for Grid applications, including numerial methods for control of accuracy and latency tolerance.

The GrADS project will also develop and exploit MicroGrid testbeds to systematically explore, demonstrate, and characterize the effectiveness of the technologies developed while using the evolving national Grid testbeds for full-scale experimentation and demonstration.

The PIs will work closely with industrial partners to encourage the adoption and standardization of system software technologies that arise from the research. They will work directly with the application developers through the two National Science Foundation Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACIs): the National Computational Science Alliance and National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). They will also work closely with the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG) and Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative/Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASCI/ASAP) programs, which plan to investigate the Grid as a computing and information resource.

If successful, GrADS will foster research and technology transfer programs that will contribute to revolutionary new ways of using the global information infrastructure as a platform for computation, changing the way scientists and engineers solve their everyday problems.

For more information, contact Patsy Gray at patsy@rice.edu