Tunable scheduling in a GridRPC framework

Among existing grid middleware approaches, one simple, powerful, and flexible approach consists of using servers available in different administrative domains through the classic client–server or remote procedure call paradigm. Network Enabled Servers (NES) implement this model, also called GridRPC. Clients submit computation requests to a scheduler, whose goal is to find a server available on the grid using some performance metric. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of a NES middleware developed in the GRAAL team called distributed interactive engineering toolbox (DIET) and to describe recent developments around plug‐in schedulers, workflow management, and tools. DIET is a hierarchical set of components used for the development of applications based on computational servers on the grid. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.