The Testbed and Applications working group of the European Grid Forum (EGrid) is actively building and experimenting with a grid infrastructure connecting several research-based supercomputing sites located in Europe. The paper reports on our first feasibility study: running a self-migrating version of the Cactus simulation code across the European grid testbed, including "live" remote data visualization and steering from different demonstration booths at Supercomputing 2000, in Dallas, TX. We report on the problems that had to be resolved for this endeavour and identify open research challenges for building production-grade grid environments.

Presents a robust software infrastructure for metacomputing. The system is intended to be used by others as a building block for large and powerful computational grids. Much effort has been taken to develop a fault-tolerant architecture that does not exhibit a single point of failure. Furthermore, we have designed the system to be modular, lean and portable. It is available as open source code and has been successfully compiled on POSIX- and Microsoft Windows-compliant platforms. The system does not originate from a laboratory environment but has proven its robustness within two large metacomputing installations. It embodies a modular concept which allows easy integration of new or modified components. Hence, it is not necessary to buy into the system as whole. We rather encourage others to use only those components that fit into their specific environments.

We present a software system for the management of geographically distributed high-performance computers. It consists of three components: 1. The Computing Center Software (CCS) is a vendor-independent resource management software for local HPC systems. It controls the mapping and scheduling of interactive and batch jobs on massively parallel systems; 2. The Resource and Service Description (RSD) is used by CCS for specifying and mapping hardware and software components of (meta-)computing environments. It has a graphical user interface, a textual representation and an object-oriented API; 3. The Service Coordination Layer (SCL) co-ordinates the co-operative use of resources in autonomous computing sites. It negotiates between the applications' requirements and the available system services. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.