Interoperability between ARC and gLite - Understanding the Grid-Job Life Cycle

ARC and gLite are two of the leading production-ready Grid middleware solutions being used by thousands of researchers every day. Even though the middlewares leverage the same technologies, there are substantial architectural and implementation divergences. Today, users face difficulties trying to cross the boundaries of the two systems. The gLite clients have so far not been capable of accessing ARC resources and vice versa. This paper is a follow up on an earlier proposal on how to enable interoperability between these two middlewares. Further, the paper presents a thorough walkthrough of the protocols and steps involved in the submission of a job in grids built up of the two different middlewares.