The development of grid algorithms is frequently ham- pered by limited means to describe topologies and lack of support for the invasive composition of legacy components in order to pass data between them. In this paper we present a solution to overcome these limitations using the notion of invasive patterns for the construction of distributed algo- rithms, a recent extension of well-known computation and communication patterns. Concretely, we present two con- tributions. First, based on a study of how patterns are in- stantiated in NAS Grid, a well-known benchmark used for evaluating performance of computational grids, we show how invasive patterns can be used for the declarative defini- tion of large-scale grid topologies and checkpointing algo- rithms. Second, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate how our approach can be used to implement the checkpoint- ing on top of grid applications.