Abstract
Computational Grids have been identified as one of the paradigms revolutionizing the discipline of distributed computing. The contributions within the Grid community have resulted in new Grid technologies and continuous improvements to Grid standards and protocols. Though crucial to the success of the Grid approach, such an incremental evolution of Grid standards has become a primary cause of frustration for scientific and commercial application communities aspiring to adopt the Grid paradigm. Motivated by our rich experience and the need to decouple the application development and the Grid technology development processes, we propose an abstraction-based Grid middleware layer as part of the Java CoG Kit. In this paper, we showcase our abstraction model and verify its extensibility by integrating it with an advanced quality-of-service-based execution framework.