Grid middleware in China

Grids aim at constructing a virtual single image of heterogeneous resources and provide uniform interface for distributed internet applications. China also devotes much passion and endeavour to the evolution of grid projects. Based on the experience in building and enhancing Chinese grids in collaboration with colleagues from around the globe, it is important to choose grid technologies that support and work on a wide variety of resources. Grid middleware research and development in China is described in this paper. First we give the overview of the three government-sponsored grid programmes, namely, China National Grid, ChinaGrid and NSFCGrid. Then three representative grid middleware, ChinaGrid Support Platform (CGSP), China National Grid Operation System (GOS), China Research and Development Environment Over Wide-area Network (CROWN) are introduced in detail from six aspects: design motivation, architecture, function modules, main features, interoperability, current status and applications. Finally, we abstract the main characteristics of these three middleware systems and put forward a comparison among them.