Transparent cross- platform access to software services using gridsolve and gridRPC

Distributed computing can be daunting even for experienced programmers. Although many projects have been created to facilitate developing distributed applications, they are often quite complex in themselves. While many scientific applications could benefit from distributed computing, the complexity of the programming models can be a high barrier to entry, especially since many of these applications are developed by domain scientists without extensive training in software development. Thus, we believe that the paramount design consideration of a distributed computing model should be ease of use. With this in mind, we discuss GridRPC, which is a model for remote procedure call (RPC) in the context of a computational grid or other loosely coupled distributed computing environment. Then we discuss GridSolve, an implementation of the GridRPC model.