In this work, we demonstrate the power of providing a common set of operating system services to Grid Architectures, including high-performance I/O, communication, resource management, and process management. A Grid enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed resources including supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and specialized devices owned by different organizations administered with different policies. In the last few years, a

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... umber of exciting projects like Globus, Legion, and UNICORE developed the software infrastructure needed for grid computing. However, operating system support for grid computing is minimal or non-existent. Tool writers are forced to re-invent the wheel by implementing from scratch. This is error prone and often results in sub-optimal solutions. To address these problems, we are developing GridOS, a set of operating system services that facilitate grid computing. The services are designed to make writing middleware easier and make a normal commodity operating system like Linux highly suitable for grid computing. The modules are designed to be policy neutral, exploit commonality in various grid infrastructures and provide highperformance. Experiments with GridOS verify that there is dramatic improvement in performance when compared to the existing grid file transfer protocols like GridFTP. Our proof-ofconcept middleware shows that writing middleware is easy using GridOS.