Optimisation of Component-based Applications within a Grid Environment Nathalie Furmento, Anthony Mayer, Stephen McGough, Steven Newhouse, Tony Field, and John Darlington Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, Department of Computing, Huxley Building, 180 Queen’s Gate, London SW7 2BZ, UK icpc-sw@doc.ic.ac.uk http://www-icpc.doc.ic.ac.uk/components/ Abstract. Effective exploitation of computational grids can only be achieved when applications are fully integrated with the grid middleware and the underlying computational resources. Fundamental to this ex- ploitation is information. Information about the structure and behaviour of the application, the capability of the computational and networking resources, and the availability and access to these resources by an indi- vidual, a group or an organisation. This paper describes an integrated grid environment that is open, ex- tensible and platform independent. We match a high-level application specification, defined as a network of components, to an optimal combi- nation of the currently available component implementations within our grid environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this architecture through high-level specification and solution of a set of linear equations by automatic and optimal resource and implementation selection. 1 Introduction The emergence of computational grids presents a number of challenges for the future of high performance computing. The grid, as discussed in [1], is defined as a wide-area network of heterogeneous computing resources, characterised by dis- tinct administrative domains, and diverse operating systems and architectures. While it has been demonstrated that computational grids can provide a huge pool of potential high performance resources, the dynamic nature of the environ- ment may inhibit efficient high performance computing; resources may become unavailable at any time, and it is impossible for the application scheduler to control the availability or dynamic properties of the resources unless it is closely coupled to a specific architecture. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SC2001 November 2001, Denver (c) 2001 ACM 1-58113-293-X/01/0011 $5.00