DIRAC: The Distributed MC Production and Analysis for LHCb

Abstract

DIRAC is the LHCb distributed computing grid infrastructure for MC production and analysis. Its architecture is based on a set of distributed collaborating services. The service decomposition broadly follows the CERN/ARDA-RTAG proposal, which can eventually make possible the interchange of the EGEE/gLite and DIRAC components. In this paper we give an overview of the DIRAC architecture, as well as the main design choices in its implementation. The light nature and modular design of the DIRAC components allows its functionality to be easily extended to include new computing and storage elements or to handle new types of tasks. The DIRAC system already uses different types of computing resources - from single PC's to a variety of batch systems and to the Grid environment. In particular, the DIRAC interface to the LCG2 grid will be presented