Uniform Access to Heterogeneous Grid Infrastructures with JSAGA

International audienceGrids have been developed to provide uniform access to computing and storage resources, but since existing grid infrastructures have been deployed within the context of distinct projects, technological choices have often differed. Many users need to use several grid infrastructures, and they are facing complexity because of these differences. Several existing tools hide the middleware heterogeneity for this very purpose. However, the existing infrastructures do not differ only by their middleware; they also differ by their policies (e.g. network filtering rules), the supported security contexts (e.g. known certificate authorities) and the worker nodes configuration (e.g. available commands and services, environment variables). This paper explains how JSAGA, an implementation of the OGF SAGA (Simple API for Grid Application) specification[8], addresses these issues to enable efficient and uniform usage of existing grid infrastructures, such as EGEE[12], OSG[13], DEISA[14], NAREGI[15]..