Description
In the High Energy Physics (HEP) community, Grid technologies have
been accepted as solutions to the distributed computing problem.
Several Grid projects have provided software in the last years. Among
of all them, the LCG - especially aimed at HEP applications -
provides a set of services and respective client interfaces, both in
the form of command line tools as well as programming language APIs
in C, C++, Java, etc.
Unfortunately, the programming interface presented to the end user
(the physicist) is often not uniform or provides different levels of
abstractions. In addition, Grid technologies face a constant change
and an improvement process and it is of major importance to shield
changes of underlying technology to the end users. As services
evolve and new ones are introduced, the way users interact with them
also changes.
These new interfaces are often designed to work at a different level
and with a different focus than the original ones. This makes it hard
for the end user to build Grid applications.
We have analyzed the existing LCG programming environment and
identified several ways to provide high-level technology independent
interfaces. In this article, we describe the use cases we were
presented by the LCG experiments and the specific problems we
encountered in documenting existing APIs and providing
usage examples. As a main contribution, we also propose a prototype
high-level interface for the information, authentication and
authorization systems that is now under test on the LCG EIS testbed
by the LHC experiments.
Primary authors
A. Delgado Peris
(CERN)
A. Sciaba'
(CERN)
F. Donno
(CERN)
P. Mendez Lorenzo
(CERN)
R. Santinelli
(CERN)
S. Campana
(CERN)
