Résumé
DIRAC (Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control) is a general framework for the management of tasks over distributed heterogeneous computing environments. It has been originally developed to support the production activities of the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider Beauty) experiment and today is extensively used by several particle physics and biology communities. Current (Fermi Large Area Telescope – LAT) and planned (Cherenkov Telescope Array – CTA) new generation astrophysical/cosmological experiments, with very large processing and storage needs, are currently investigating the usability of DIRAC in this context. Each of these use cases has some peculiarities: Fermi-LAT will interface DIRAC to its own workflow system to allow the access to the grid resources, while CTA is using DIRAC as workflow management system for Monte Carlo production and analysis on the grid. We describe the prototype effort that we lead toward deploying a DIRAC solution for some aspects of Fermi-LAT and CTA needs. 1. Introduction The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is the primary instrument on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission, launched on June 11, 2008. It is the product of an international collaboration between DOE, NASA and academic US institutions as well as international partners in France, Italy, Japan and Sweden. The LAT is a pair-conversion detector of high-energy gamma rays covering the energy range from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV [1]. It has been designed to detect gamma rays in a broad energy range, with good position resolution (<10 arcmin) and an energy resolution of ∼10%. The LAT has been routinely monitoring the gamma-ray sky and has shed light on the extreme, non-thermal Universe. A brief and recent review of Fermi-LAT discoveries can be found in [2].