Operation of the Core D-Grid Infrastructure

D-Grid is a German implementation of a grid, granted by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. In this paper we present the Core D-Grid which acts as a condensation nucleus to build a production grid infrastructure. The main difference compared to other international grid initiatives is the support of three middleware systems, namely LCG/gLite, Globus, and UNICORE for compute resources. Storage resources are connected via SRM/dCache and OGSA-DAI. In contrast to homogeneous communities, the partners in Core D-Grid have different missions and backgrounds (computing centers, universities, research centers), providing heterogeneous hardware from single processors to high performance supercomputing systems with different operating systems. We present methods to integrate these resources and services for the D- Grid infrastructure like a point of information, centralized user and virtual organization management, resource registration, software provisioning, and policies for the implementation (firewalls, certificates, user mapping).