The Grid Application Toolkit - GAT

Many scientific application developers wish to make use of the possibilities opened up by the advent of the Grid. These developers, however, often cannot spare the resources to fully investigate the wealth of Grid technologies and APIs which currently exist. They would rather be presented with a simple API close to the programming paradigms and interfaces they are used to for the fairly simple common operations they need to perform, e.g remote job submission, data access, etc.

For example, to copy a file on a Grid, a Fortran application programmer wants to see a call very much like:

      call fileCopy (source, destination)
  

Although this example is simplified, it illustrates the motivation for our work. The APIs specified by the GAT will deliver a similar level of abstraction for a small set of basic Grid operations.

The GAT will lower the barrier for scientific application developers to make use of the grid by providing a small, consistent API for the operations of interest.

The GAT API targets developers of scientific applications who wish to grid enable their applications whilst spending as little time as possible learning new paradigms. Simplicity and conciseness will be the governing design principles for the API.

Initially, the API will cover following areas:

• data access
• job submission
• event exchange
• information exchange