ENABLING APPLICATIONS ON THE GRID: A GRIDLAB OVERVIEW.

The primary aim of GridLab is to provide users and application developers with a simple and robust environment enabling them to produce applications that can exploit the full power and possibilities of the Grid. The GridLab project brings together computer scientists with computational scientists from various application areas to design and implement a Grid Application Toolkit (GAT), together with a set of Grid services, in a production grid environment. The GAT will provide functionality through a carefully constructed set of generic high-level APIs, through which an application will be able to call the underlying Grid services. The project will demonstrate the benefits of the GAT by developing and implementing real application scenarios, illustrating compelling new uses of the Grid. The development of the OAT is accompanied by the establishment of a pan-European testbed and by the development of Grid services of varying complexity, tailored to the needs of user community. These services are designed to complement and complete the existing Grid infrastructure, and to provide functionality needed by the GridLab applications in order to be usefully deployed in such environment.