Universal Grid client: Grid Operation Invoker

In this paper we present a high-level approach to programming applications which use the Grid from the client side. This study is devoted to resolving the need for a language that would allow expressing the application logic in a precise way and combining it with the capability of remote access to powerful Grid resources and complex computational software. We introduce the concept of a universal Grid client - a Grid Operation Invoker (GOI). It provides a client-side interface to computational resources that use various middleware packages within a high-level scripting language. The system prototype is written in JRuby which is a Java implementation of a popular object-oriented scripting language interpreter - Ruby. We also present issues that have emerged in the course of work on GOI and which we have found challenging. Finally, we discuss Grid applications implemented in JRuby, proving that GOI can be used to solve highly complicated and computationally-intensive problems.