1. Introduction

Researchers today are becoming increasingly reliant on the availability of computational re-sources to assist in their research and quantify their findings. The creation of Grids has helped increase the availability of such resources by combining the computing power and storage re-sources of many computers into one. However, harnessing these combined resources is still a challenge and out of reach for many scientists. As a mechanism for providing access to various distributed hardware and software resources, NetSolve reduces the complexity of locating, accessing, and using the computational resources necessary for conducting timely research. To accomplish this goal, NetSolve provides the middleware necessary to provide a seamless bridge between the simple, standard programming interfaces and desktop systems that dominate the work of computational scientists and the rich supply of services supported by the emerging Grid architecture, so that the users of the former can easily access and reap the benefits (shared processing, storage, software, data resources, etc.) of using the latter. This vision of the...