LCG AND ARC MIDDLEWARE INTEROPERABILITY

LCG and ARC are two of the major production-ready Grid middleware solutions being used by hundreds of HEP researchers every day. Even though the middlewares are based on same technology, there are substantial architectural and implementational divergences. An ordinary user faces difficulties trying to cross the boundaries of the two systems. LCG clients so far have not been capable accessing ARC resources and vice versa. After presenting the similarities and differences of the LCG and ARC middlewares, this paper focuses on the strategies for implementing interoperable layers between the two solutions. The most important areas are job submission and the information system. The basic requirement for the interoperability layer is the capability for transparent job submission from LCG to ARC.