The broad vision of the Programming Tools thrust is to provide for application users with very high-level interfaces that allow automatic construction of capabilities that are (currently) hard to achieve in a Grid environment.  Early in the VGrADS project, we used the insights from these high-level interfaces to help define Virtual Grids (VGs) and the interfaces to the Virtual Grid Execution System (vgES). More recently, we have begun design of tools to take advantage of this abstraction and tools to provide more application-specific abstractions.

Some of the tools projects that we have worked on include:

1. Improved scheduling for workflow computations on the Grid and VGs.
2. Performance prediction of application components to be mapped onto the Grid.
3. Compiling and optimizing node programs for use in a Grid environment.
4. Fault-tolerant libraries for MPI and OpenMP.
5. Construction of Grid workflows from high-level scripts.
6. Generating Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for applications.