Application Experiences with the Globus Toolkit

The development of applications and tools for high-performance ``computational grids'' is complicated by the heterogeneity and frequently dynamic behavior of the underlying resources; by the complexity of the applications themselves, which often combine aspects of supercomputing and distributed computing; and by the need to achieve high levels of performance. The Globus toolkit has been developed with the goal of simplifying this application development task, by providing implementations of various core services deemed essential for high-performance distributed computing. In this paper, we describe two large applications developed with this toolkit: a distributed interactive simulation and a teleimmersion system. We describe the process used to develop the applications, review lessons learned, and draw conclusions regarding the effectiveness of the toolkit approach.