Extensible Job Managers for Grid Computing

Grid computing is becoming an important framework for enabling applications to utilize widely distributed collections of computational and data resources, however current grid software is still immature and rather difficult to use. The Globus Grid Toolkit is a set of low-level tools, protocols and services that has become a defacto standard for basic grid computing infrastructure. The Globus Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM) service provides for the management and remote execution of jobs defined using a standard Resource Specification Language (RSL). Currently, the GRAMhas very limited functionality, which makes it more difficult to develop grid applications. One limitation is the lack of support for applications that require a special execution environment, such as Java applications that run within a Java Virtual Machine. Cumbersome workarounds are necessary to run such applications