Rather, the API seeks to hide the detail of any service infrastructures that may or may not be used to implement the functionality that the application developer needs.

SAGA covers the most important and frequently used distributed functionality and is supported and available on every major grid systems - Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), EGI and FutureGrid.

[7][8][9][10] All SAGA specifications are defined in (a flavor of) IDL, and thus object oriented, but language neutral.

Apart from the implementation language, they differ from each other in their completeness in terms of standard coverage, as well as in their support for distributed middleware.

RADICAL-SAGA[14] is a light-weight Python package that implements parts of the OGF GFD.90[1] interface specification and provides plug-ins for different distributed middleware systems and services.

RADICAL-SAGA implements the most commonly used features of GFD.90 based upon extensive use-case analysis, and focuses on usability and simple deployment in real-world heterogeneous distributed computing environments and application scenarios.

RADICAL-SAGA provides plug-ins for different distributed middleware systems and services, including support for the PBS, Sun Grid Engine, SSH, SFTP and others.

On the back-end, it interfaces with HiLA, a generic grid access client library, which is part of the UNICORE system.

The work related to the SAGA Project is funded by the following grants: NSF-CHE 1125332 (CDI),[19] NSF-EPS 1003897 (LaSIGMA),[20] NSF-OCI 1007115 (ExTENCI).