For the period July 1, 2001 – July 31, 2004

The computing demand of many state-of-the-art scientific applications, such as climate modeling, astrophysics, high energy physics, structural biology, chemistry, and tele-immersive engineering, will require the coordinated use of numerous distributed and heterogeneous components, including advanced networks, computers, storage devices, display devices, and scientific instruments. Such a national collaborative Grid infrastructure is currently being developed and supported by DOE, NSF, and NASA. Developing advanced scientific applications for these emerging national-scale Computational Grid infrastructures is still a difficult task. Although elementary Grid services are available that assist the application developers in authentication, remote access to computers, resource management, and infrastructure discovery, these services often are not compatible with the commodity technologies and frameworks used by application scientists today, or they are too complex to be used by computational scientists who are not experts in Grid programming. A higher level of abstraction is demanded that provides advanced

Grid services within frameworks that are, and will be, used as part of the scientific problem-solving process.