Coordinated harnessing of the IRISGrid and EGEE testbeds with GridWay

Since the late 1990s, we have witnessed an extraordinary development of Grid technologies. Nowadays, different Grids are being deployed within the context of a growing number of national and transnational research projects. However, the coexistence of those different infrastructures involves two challenging issues, namely: (i) simultaneous and coordinated use of resources from different Grids, from the end user perspective; and (ii) the simultaneous contribution of resources to different Grids, from the resource owner perspective. In this paper, we demonstrate that a decentralized and “end-to-end” scheduling and execution system can efficiently interoperate different Grids. In particular, we evaluate the coordinated use of the EGEE and IRISGrid testbeds in the execution of a Bioinformatics application. Results show the feasibility of building loosely coupled computational Grid environments only based on Globus services, while obtaining non-trivial levels of quality of service, in terms of performance and reliability. Such approach allows a straightforward resource sharing since the resources are accessed by using de facto standard protocols and interfaces.