The GridSpace technology is a platform for constructing and provisioning distributed applications. It delivers a means for integrating IT services, deployable software components and diverse data sources into consistent applications. Moreover, GridSpace provides tools for developing applications in a friendly, Ruby-based environment, as well as a runtime system and Web-based interface for executing them. Accompanying modules include version management, remote service registration and security.

The GridSpace technology, developed by the DICE Team, underwent a seriuos refactoring throughout the last years, resulting in a new version - GridSpace2. For more information on GridSpace2 please visit http://dice.cyfronet.pl/gridspace/.

The first version of the GridSpace technology was created within and applied to the following research projects:

ViroLab

The ViroLab Project developed a virtual laboratory for research in the area of infectious diseases. In particular, it targets the drug resistance problem in HIV anti-viral therapy, using genetic information and computer modeling. GridSpace technology is used here as the main building block of the virtual laboratory, providing the core runtime, services and tools for programmers, computational scientists and virologists, enabling them to address important issues in modern treatment of infectious diseases through collaborative in-silico research.

GREDIA

The GREDIA Project prepared a system for access to multimedia data on the Grid, in the context of business applications. GREDIA focuses on media and banking sectors. Here, GridSpace is applied as a core of the Appea platform, which enables users to quickly develop and deploy application scenarios, making use of the available Grid services and data resources. Moreover, GridSpace is capable of interfacing end users and present them with custom user interfaces, adapted to the needs of individual application domains.

ChemPo

The ChemPo project develops a computational chemistry portal which facilitates the use of numerous packages (e.g. Gaussian or GAMESS) deployed on the Grid infrastructure. All Grid-related operations, such as proxy certificate generation or LFC data catalog access, are supported. GridSpace is used to orchestrate the process of job submission and management. It also enables scientists to analyze their output data in a semi-automatic manner.