NorduGrid is a

collaboration Collaboration (from Latin ''com-'' "with" + ''laborare'' "to labor", "to work") is the process of two or more people, entities or organizations working together to complete a task or achieve a goal. Collaboration is similar to cooperation. The ...

aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free

Grid Grid, The Grid, or GRID may refer to: Space partitioning * Regular grid, a tessellation of space with translational symmetry, typically formed from parallelograms or higher-dimensional analogs ** Grid graph, a graph structure with nodes connec ...

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...

, known as the

Advanced Resource Connector Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) is a grid computing middleware introduced by NorduGrid. It provides a common interface for submission of computational tasks to different distributed computing systems and thus can enable grid infrastructure ...

(ARC).

History

The name ''NorduGrid'' first became known in 2001 as short for the project called "Nordic Testbed for Wide Area Computing and Data Handling" funded by the

Nordic Council of Ministers The Nordic Council of Ministers is an intergovernmental forum established after the Helsinki Treaty. The purpose of the Nordic Council of Ministers is to complement the Nordic Council and promote Nordic cooperation. Structure The governm ...

via the Nordunet2 programme. That project's main goal was to set up a prototype of a distributed computing infrastructure (a ''

testbed A testbed (also spelled test bed) is a platform for conducting rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computing tools, and new technologies. The term is used across many disciplines to describe experimental research ...

''), aiming primarily at the needs of the

High Energy Physics Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the stu ...

researchers in the

ATLAS experiment ATLAS is the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. The experiment is designed to take advantage of ...

. Following evaluation of the then existing

technology solutions, NorduGrid developers came up with an alternative

software architecture Software architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements a ...

. It was implemented and demonstrated in May 2002, and soon became known as the ''NorduGrid Middleware''. In 2004 this middleware solution was given a proper name, the

(ARC). Until May 2003, NorduGrid headquarters were in the

Niels Bohr Institute The Niels Bohr Institute () is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and biophysics. Overview The institute was foun ...

; at the 5th NorduGrid Workshop it was decided to move them to the

Oslo University The University of Oslo (; ) is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the oldest university in Norway. Originally named the Royal Frederick University, the university was established in 1811 as the de facto Norwegian conti ...

. The present-day formal collaboration was established in 2005 by five

Nordic Nordic most commonly refers to: * Nordic countries, the northern European countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and their North Atlantic territories * Scandinavia, a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern ...

academic institutes (

in Copenhagen, Denmark,

Helsinki Institute of Physics The Helsinki Institute of Physics (HIP, , ) is a physics research institute operated jointly by University of Helsinki, Aalto University, University of Jyväskylä, Lappeenranta University of Technology and Tampere University of Technology. The ope ...

in Finland,

in Norway, and

Lund Lund (, ;"Lund"
(US) and ) is a city in the provinces of Sweden, province of Scania, southern Swed ...

and

Uppsala Uppsala ( ; ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the capital of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inhabitants in 2019. Loc ...

Universities in Sweden) with the goal to develop, support, maintain and popularize ARC. Deployment and support of the Nordic

infrastructure itself became the responsibility of the NDGF project, launched in June 2006. This marked clear separation between Grid middleware providers and infrastructure services providers. To further support ARC development, NorduGrid and several other interested partners secured dedicated funding through EU FP6 project

KnowARC Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) is a grid computing middleware introduced by NorduGrid. It provides a common interface for submission of computational tasks to different distributed computing systems and thus can enable grid infrastructures of ...

. NorduGrid Collaboration is based upon a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding and is open for new members.

Goals

The NorduGrid Collaboration is the consortium behind the ARC middleware, and its key goal is to ensure that ARC is further developed, maintained, supported and widely deployed, while remaining a free

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

, suitable for a wide variety of high-throughput

computational tasks. The ultimate goal is to provide a reliable, scalable, portable and full-featured solution for

infrastructures, conformant with open standards, primarily those developed in the framework of the

Open Grid Forum The Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a community of users, developers, and vendors for standardization of grid computing. It was formed in 2006 in a merger of the Global Grid Forum and the Enterprise Grid Alliance. The OGF models its process on the In ...

. While ARC software development may and does often take place outside NorduGrid, the Collaboration coordinates contributions to the code and maintains the code and software repositories, as well as a build system, an issue tracking system and other necessary software development services. NorduGrid defines strategical directions for development of ARC and ensures financial support for it.

ARC Community

The term "ARC Community" is used to refer to various groups of people willing to share their computational resources via ARC. A

tit-for-tat Tit for tat is an English saying meaning "equivalent retaliation". It is an alternation (linguistics), alternation of ''wikt:tip#Noun 3, tip for wikt:tap#Verb 2, tap'' "blow for blow", first recorded in 1558. It is also a highly effective strat ...

user group is formalized as a virtual organisation (VO), allowing the mutual use of such community resources. Contrary to the popular belief, NorduGrid members are not required to provide computing or storage resources; neither offering such resources grants an automatic membership. Still, ARC community as a whole owns a substantial amount of computing and storage resources. On a voluntarily basis, and for the purpose of the open-source development process, community members may donate CPU cycles and some storage space to the developers and testers. Such resources constitute the

for the ARC middleware. Other than such donated community resources, NorduGrid does not provide or allocate any computational resources and does not coordinate worldwide deployment of ARC. Actual deployment and usage of ARC-based distributed computing infrastructures is coordinated by the respective infrastructure projects, such as e.g
NeIC
Apart from contributing computational resources, many groups develop higher-level software tools on top of ARC (e.g.).

NorduGrid Certification Authority

NorduGrid Certification Authority
(CA) is currently the only major infrastructure service provided by the NorduGrid. This Authority issues electronic certificates to users and services, such that they can work in Grid environments. Present day Grid implementations require

X.509 In cryptography, X.509 is an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard defining the format of public key certificates. X.509 certificates are used in many Internet protocols, including TLS/SSL, which is the basis for HTTPS, the secure ...

certificates to validate identity of Grid participants. NorduGrid CA provides such certificates to individuals and machines associated with research and/or academic institutions in

Denmark Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...

Finland Finland, officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bothnia to the west and the Gulf of Finland to the south, ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

and

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

. The NorduGrid Certification Authority is a member of th
European Policy Management Authority for Grid Authentication (EUGridPMA)
EUGridPMA Members
/ref>

External links

NorduGrid Web siteNorduGrid Certification AuthorityKnowARC
EU project contributing to the ARC middleware development
Nordic DataGrid Facility
a Nordic project contributing to the ARC middleware development

References