The work presented in this paper is part of the Java Card (TM) Grid project2 carried out at LaBRI, Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique. The aim of this project is to build a hardware platform and the associated software components to experiment on the security features of distributed applications. To achieve this goal we use the hardware components that offer the highest security level: smart cards. We do not pretend that the resulting platform can compare to a real grid in terms of computational power, but it serves as a proof of concept for what a grid with secure processors could be and could do. As of writing, the hardware platform comprises 32 card readers and two PCs to manage them. The applications that we run on our platform are applications that require a high level of condentiality regarding their own binary code, the input data that they handle, and the results that they produce. Even though we know that we cannot expect our grid to achieve high speed computation, we believe that it is a good testbed to experiment on the security features that one would require in a real grid environment. This paper focuses on the software infrastructure that we have set up to manage the platform and on the framework that we have designed and implemented to develop real applications on top of it.