High level grid programming with ASSIST

Abstract: The development of efficient Grid applications usually requires writing huge portions of code directly at the level of abstraction provided by the underlying Grid middleware. In this work we discuss an alternative approach, raising the level of abstraction used when programming Grid applications. Our approach requires programmers just to describe in a qualitative way the kind of parallelism they want to express. Then, compiler tools, loader tools and run time system take complete care of running the application on a Grid target architecture. This allows to move most of the cumbersome tasks related to Grid targeting and management from programmer responsibility to tools. This paper introduces the structured parallel programming environment ASSIST, whose design is aimed at raising the level of abstraction in Grid programming and discusses how it can support transparent Grid programming while implementing Grid adaptivity