With a logical view closer to a distributed operating system than a pure communication infrastructure, one might consider extending for computational grids the basic functionalities found in the commodity Internet’s network infrastructure to a higher level, thus offering higher value functionalities than the standard IP routing functionality that has basically remained unchanged for 2 decades. In this paper, we report on our early experiences in building application-aware components for a multicast communication protocol targeted for providing low latencies and low overheads for applications running on a computational grid. Performance results from both simulations and implementation prototypes confirm that introducing application-aware components at specific location in the network infrastructure can succeed in providing not only performances for the end-users but also new perspectives in building a communication framework for computational grids.