Engineering an interoperable computational collaboratory on the Grid

The growth of the Internet and the advent of the computational Grid have made it possible to develop and deploy advanced computational collaboratories. These systems build on high‐end computational resources, communication technologies and enabling services underlying the Grid, and provide seamless and collaborative access to resources, applications and data. Combining these focused collaboratories and allowing them to interoperate has many advantages and can lead to truly collaborative, multidisciplinary and multi‐institutional problem solving. However, integrating these collaboratories presents significant challenges, as each of these collaboratories has a unique architecture and implementation, and builds on different enabling technologies. This paper investigates the issues involved in integrating collaboratories operating on the Grid. It then presents the design and implementation of a prototype middleware substrate to enable a peer‐to‐peer integration of and global access to multiple, geographically distributed instances of the DISCOVER computational collaboratory. An experimental evaluation of the middleware substrate is presented. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.