Preface

Ninf-G is developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan. The Ninf-G official website can be found at ninf.apgrid.org, and includes complete user and programmer documentation in both English and Japanese. Ninf-G is a Remote Proceduce Call (RPC) implementation for use on Globus-based Grids. The API implemented within Ninf-G is a reference implementation of the proposed GGF GridRPC API standard. GridRPC adapts effectively to wide variety of applications and it is especially suitable for developing general and scalable task-parallel applications. Ninf-G includes both C and Java APIs for client programming, an Interface Description Language (IDL) compiler for stub generation, and several commands for system management and utilization.

Ninf-G originated from the Ninf system, released by Ninf project at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in 1996. Development of Ninf-G was started in 2000 and it has been designed to work with basic Grid services, such as GSI, Pre-WS GRAM, and MDS in the Globus Toolkit. Ninf-G provides a simple, yet powerful, client-server-based standard RPC mechanism, plus asynchronous, coarse-grained parallel tasking frameworks for programming on a Grid, while hiding the complexity of using these services from application programmers. Ninf-G is currently used as key middleware several Grid projects including: Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), Asia Pacific Partnership for Grid Computing (ApGrid), Application developments in TeraGrid, and Grid Superscaler.