This paper describes work in progress to develop a component-based software infrastructure, called Padico, for computational grids based on the CORBA Component Model from the OMG. The objective of Padico is to offer a component model targeting multi-physics simulations or any applications that require the coupling of several codes (simulation or visualization) within a high-performance environment. This paper addresses mainly two issues we identified as important for a grid-aware component model. The first issue deals with the encapsulation of parallel codes into components. We propose an extension to the CORBA component model called \gridccm. The second issue addresses the problem of the communication between components within a computational grid. We propose a portable runtime, called PadicoTM, able to efficiently support communication in a heterogeneous networking environment.