Concepts and design of an interoperability reference model for scientific- and grid computing infrastructures

Many production Grid and e-science infrastructures offer their broad range of resources via services to endusers during the past several years with an increasing number of scientific applications that require access to a wide variety of resources and services in multiple Grids. But the vision of world-wide federated Grid infrastructures in analogy to the electrical power Grid is still not seamlessly provided today. This is partly due to the fact, that Grids provide a much more variety of services (job management, data management, data transfer, etc.) in comparison with the electrical power Grid, but also the emerging open standards are still partly to be improved in terms of production usage. This paper points exactly to these improvements with a well-defined design of an infrastructure interoperability reference model that is based on open standards that are refined with experience gained by production Grid interoperability use cases. This contribution gives insights into the core building blocks in general, but focuses significantly on the computing building blocks of the reference model in particular.