This work describes an approach to building Grid applications based on the premise that users who wish to access and run these applications prefer to do so without becoming experts on Grid technology. We describe an application architecture based on wrapping user applications and application workflows as Web services and Web service resources. These services are visible to the users and to resource providers through a family of Grid portal components that can be used to configure, launch, and monitor complex applications in the scientific language of the end user. The applications in this model are instantiated by an application factory service. The layered design of the architecture makes it possible for an expert to configure an application factory service with a custom user interface client that may be dynamically loaded into the portal.

Management of Grid resource information is a challenging, and important area considering the potential size of the Grid and wide range of resources that should be represented. Though example Grid Information Servers exist, behavior of these servers across different platforms is less well understood. This paper describes a study we undertook to compare the access language and platform capabilities for three different database platforms, relational, native XML, and LDAP, serving as a Grid information server. Our study measures query response times for a range of queries and highlights sensitivities exhibited by the different platforms to variables such as result set size and collection size.