LcgCAF: a CDF Submission Portal to Access Grid Resources

The improvements of the luminosity of the Tevatron Collider require large increases in computing requirements for the CDF experiment which has to be able to increase proportionally the amount of Monte Carlo data it produces. This is, in turn, forcing the CDF Collaboration to move beyond the used dedicated resources and start exploiting Grid resources. CDF has been running a set of CDF Analysis Farm (CAFs), which are submission portals to dedicated pools, and LcgCAF is basically a reimplementation of the CAF model in order to access Grid resources by using the LCG/EGEE Middleware components. LcgCAF is constituted by a set of services each of them responsible for accepting, submitting and monitoring CDF user jobs during theirs lifetimes in the Grid environment. This paper presents an overview of the LcgCAF architecture within the Grid environment. The performances and future improvements are also discussed.