A general purpose suite for Grid resources exploitation

We present a general-purpose software framework, which allows different multi-disciplinary communities to take advantage of a distributed computational infrastructure. The ultimate goal is to provide organizations that need to exploit resources with CPU-intensive loose-parallel tasks with a software service capable to offer a user-friendly, standard and highly customizable access to the Grid. The software suite we developed has been designed specifically for organizations that cannot afford the adoption costs of more specialized and complex frameworks, developed in High Energy Physics (HEP) environment, but that still require an easy-to-use interface to the Grid. Our framework heavily relies on a bookkeeping database, storing both application-specific and infrastructure meta-data, which is tightly coupled with a web-based user-interface. The first makes available to the users information on the execution status of jobs and their specific meaning and parameters, and contributes in orchestrating the submission mechanism. The latter provides job submission management, bookkeeping database interactions, basic monitoring functionality and eLog system. Multi-site submissions based on user-defined requests and fine grain parametric submission interfaces are available. The structure of framework services follow a centralized design: job management service and bookkeeping database are hosted in a European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) site. Jobs executed into remote sites transfer their output to predefined target site repository and update the bookkeeping database. In addition, the framework requires a proper configuration of the remote Grid sites on which the jobs will run. Results from a large production of Monte Carlo simulated events submitted to 15 Grid sites are reported, and a comparison in terms of features, scopes, and targets, with a broad spectrum of general-purpose solutions in the same field of application is presented as well.