The Applications Area explores grid application development issues and programming interfaces required by grid applications. The outcome of this area are interface specifications, which help to implement grid applications. As a consequence, the Applications Area deals with standards on a rather high level of abstraction close to the application developer.

At present, the following interfaces are being discussed:

• The Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA) develops an

API specification for the submission and control of jobs to one or more Distributed Resource Management (DRM) systems. The scope of this specification is all the high level functionality which is necessary for an application to consign a job to a DRM system including common operations on jobs like termination or suspension.

• The Grid Remote Procedure Call (GridRPC) group works on OGF

recommendations for grid-enabled remote procedure call (RPC) APIs for both, end-user applications and also middleware developers. The idea is to further lower the barrier of acceptance for grid use by hiding the tremendous amount of infrastructure necessary to make grids work, while providing even higher-level abstractions for domain-specific middleware.

• The Simple API for Grid Applications (SAGA) tries to define an API for the

simplified development of grid applications, covering functional areas such as (logical) files, job submission and management, streaming communication, tasks, sessions, and security. The group collected a number of application use cases to serve as input for the specifications. Both DRMAA and GridRPC provide potential realizations of the SAGA job and rpc packages, respectively.

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Applications Area page