Grid Application Toolkit
What is GAT ?
The Grid Application Toolkit (GAT) is a uniform and simple API (Application Porgramming Interface), which enable the Gid access irrespective of the underlying Grid middleware. A Grid operation using GAT only requires knowledge about GAT, and no knowledge about the APIs of different Grid middlewares, e.g. as gLite, Globus or Unicore. Furthermore coding against the GAT API is much easier comared to the coding against the API of a Grid middleware. For instance, while a job submission using the Globus API requires 200 lines of code, the same job submission going over the GAT API requires only 20 lines of code.
GAT has first been realized in C, and it has been developed within the
Gridlab-Projektes. A little bit later, but still within the Gridlab project, the developmetn of the Java version of GAT (JavaGAT) has been started. Today C-GAT is out of support, but JavaGAT is still maintained by the Free University of Amsterdam. One of major advantages of JavaGAT compared to C-GAT is that JavaGAT enables the Grid access without the installation of a Grid middleware. All the software packages, which are required for the realization of a Grid client, are delivered with the JavaGAT package. The installation of JavaGAT (including the downlaod) does not exceed 5 minutes, a Globus installation, however can take several hours. Within D-Grid only JavaGAT is used. A final remark: GAT OpenSource and herewith available freely.