We describe the design and features of our Grid Computing Environments Shell system, or GCEShell. We view computing Grids as providing essentially a globally scalable distributed operating system that exposes low level programming APIs. From these system-level commands we may build a higher level library of more user-friendly shell commands, which may in turn be programmed through scripts. The GCEShell consists of a shell engine that serves as a container environment for managing GCEShell commands, which are client implementations for remote Web Service/Open Grid Service Architecture services that resemble common UNIX shell operations.
Mehmet A. Nacar, Marlon E. Pierce, Geoffrey Fox