Abstract

This white paper serves as a discussion basis for all participants in the TU Berlin managed Grid computing activities, especially those within the Sun Center of Excellence (CoE) for "Seamless, intelligent Grid services for e-Science". Computational Grids provide easy and relatively cheap access to supercomputing power by plugging together distributed computing resources. We believe that they will play a major part in the global e-Science initiatives and will help to make high-performance computing affordable for almost all research institutions. There are already two families of middleware that allow for transparent user interaction and comfortable management for the Grid. However, those products have their shortcomings and are barely interoperable with each other. Therefore, we propose an additional architectural layer that integrates the heterogenous approaches and provides the foundation for a truly global Grid. Further we identify the research efforts, which have to be undertaken in order to let our vision become reality.