Hybrid Distributed Computing Service Based on the DIRAC Interware

Scientific data intensive applications requiring simultaneous use of large amounts of computing resources are becoming quite common. Properties of applications coming from different scientific domains as well as their requirements to the computing resources are varying largely. Many scientific communities have access to different types of computing resources. Often their workflows can benefit from a combination of High Throughput (HTC) and High Performance (HPC) computing centers, cloud or volunteer computing power. However, all these resources have different user interfaces and access mechanisms, which are making their combined usage difficult for the users. This problem is addressed by projects developing software for integration of various computing centers into a single coherent infrastructure, the so-called interware. One of such software toolkits is the DIRAC interware. This product was very successful to solve problems of large High Energy Physics experiments and was reworked to offer a general-purpose solution suitable for other scientific domains. Services based on the DIRAC interware are now proposed to users of several distributed computing. One of these services is deployed at Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna. It aims at integration of computing resources of several grid and supercomputer centers as well as cloud providers. An overview of the DIRAC interware and its use for creating and operating of a hybrid distributed computing system at JINR is presented in this article.