Several works on grid computing have been proposed in the last years. However, most of them, including available software, can not deal properly with some issues related to control of applications that spread a very large number of tasks across the grid network. This work presents a step toward solving the problem of controlling such applications. We propose and discuss an architectural model called GRAND (Grid Robust ApplicatioN Deployment) based on partitioning and hierarchical submission and control of such applications. The main contribution of our model is to be able to control the execution of a huge number of distributed tasks while preserving data locality and reducing the load of the submit machines. We propose a taxonomy to classify application models to run in grid environments and partitioning methods. We also present our application description language GRID-ADL. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems; D.2.11 [Softw...