HOCs:: Higher-order components for grids

We present HOCs - Higher-Order Components - that provide the Grid application programmer with reusable and composable patterns of parallelism. HOCs can be viewed formally as higher-order functions, i.e. a generic implementation of a HOC on a remote machine can be customized with application-specific code parameters which are supplied by the user and shipped via the network. We take the well-known "Farm of Workers" pattern as our motivating example, present an experimental implementation of the Farm-HOC as a Grid Service using the Globus Toolkit, and report first measurements for a case study of computing fractal images using the Farm-HOC.