 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(March 2023) |
 | |
| Formation | February 1, 2001 |
|---|---|
| Legal status | collaboration |
| Purpose | software development |
| Headquarters | Oslo |
| Location |
|
Membership | research groups and projects |
Official language | En |
Chairman of the Board | Prof. Farid Ould-Saada |
Main organ | Consortium Board |
| Website | www |
NorduGrid is a collaboration aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free Grid middleware, known as the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC). [1]
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 via the Nordunet2 programme. That project's main goal was to set up a prototype of a distributed computing infrastructure (a testbed ), aiming primarily at the needs of the High Energy Physics researchers in the ATLAS experiment. [2] [3]
Following evaluation of the then existing Grid technology solutions, NorduGrid developers came up with an alternative software architecture. 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 Advanced Resource Connector (ARC). [4]
Until May 2003, NorduGrid headquarters were in the Niels Bohr Institute; at the 5th NorduGrid Workshop it was decided to move them to the Oslo University. [5] The present-day formal collaboration was established in 2005 by five Nordic academic institutes (Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, Helsinki Institute of Physics in Finland, Oslo University in Norway, and Lund and Uppsala Universities in Sweden) with the goal to develop, support, maintain and popularize ARC. Deployment and support of the Nordic Grid 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.
NorduGrid Collaboration is based upon a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding and is open for new members.
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, suitable for a wide variety of high-throughput Grid computational tasks.
The ultimate goal is to provide a reliable, scalable, portable and full-featured solution for Grid infrastructures, conformant with open standards, primarily those developed in the framework of the Open Grid Forum.
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.
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 user group is formalized as a virtual organisation (VO), allowing the mutual use of such community resources. [6]
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 testbed 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. NDGF, Swegrid (Sweden), Material Sciences National Grid Infrastructure (M-grid) (Finland), NorGrid (Norway) etc..[ citation needed ]
Apart from contributing computational resources, many groups develop higher-level software tools on top of ARC (e.g. [7] [8] [9] ). This kind of development is not coordinated by NorduGrid, but assistance is provided by the Collaboration upon request.[ citation needed ]
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 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, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The NorduGrid Certification Authority is a member of the European Policy Management Authority for Grid Authentication (EUGridPMA).[ citation needed ]
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
UNICORE (UNiform Interface to COmputing REsources) is a grid computing technology for resources such as supercomputers or cluster systems and information stored in databases. UNICORE was developed in two projects funded by the German ministry for education and research (BMBF). In European-funded projects UNICORE evolved to a middleware system used at several supercomputer centers. UNICORE served as a basis in other research projects. The UNICORE technology is open source under BSD licence and available at SourceForge.
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 varying size and complexity. The set of services and utilities providing the interface is known as ARC Computing Element (ARC-CE). ARC-CE functionality includes data staging and caching, developed in order to support data-intensive distributed computing. ARC is an open source software distributed under the Apache License 2.0.
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international research in many scientific disciplines. Following a series of research projects such as DataGrid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE, the EGI Foundation was formed in 2010 to sustain the services of EGI.
The D-Grid Initiative was a government project to fund computer infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. It uses the term grid computing. D-Grid started September 1, 2005 with six community projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.
GARUDA(Global Access to Resource Using Distributed Architecture) is India's Grid Computing initiative connecting 17 cities across the country. The 45 participating institutes in this nationwide project include all the IITs and C-DAC centers and other major institutes in India.
Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) was launched in 2004 as a collaboration involving the State of North Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), Duke University, and North Carolina State University. RENCI is organizationally structured as a research institute within UNC-CH, and its main campus is located in Chapel Hill, NC, a few miles from the UNC-CH campus. RENCI has engagement centers at UNC-CH, Duke University (Durham), and North Carolina State University (Raleigh).
The Nordic Data Grid Facility, or NDGF, is a common e-Science infrastructure provided by the Nordic countries for scientific computing and data storage. It is the first and so far only internationally distributed WLCG Tier1 center, providing computing and storage services to experiments at CERN.
The INFN Grid project was an initiative of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) —Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics—for grid computing. It was intended to develop and deploy grid middleware services to allow INFN's users to transparently and securely share the computing and storage resources together with applications and technical facilities for scientific collaborations.
nanoHUB.org is a science and engineering gateway comprising community-contributed resources and geared toward education, professional networking, and interactive simulation tools for nanotechnology. Funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), it is a product of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). NCN supports research efforts in nanoelectronics; nanomaterials; nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS); nanofluidics; nanomedicine, nanobiology; and nanophotonics.
gLite is a middleware computer software project for grid computing used by the CERN LHC experiments and other scientific domains. It was implemented by collaborative efforts of more than 80 people in 12 different academic and industrial research centers in Europe. gLite provides a framework for building applications tapping into distributed computing and storage resources across the Internet. The gLite services were adopted by more than 250 computing centres, and used by more than 15000 researchers in Europe and around the world.
Techila Distributed Computing Engine is a commercial grid computing software product. It speeds up simulation, analysis and other computational applications by enabling scalability across the IT resources in user's on-premises data center and in the user's own cloud account. Techila Distributed Computing Engine is developed and licensed by Techila Technologies Ltd, a privately held company headquartered in Tampere, Finland. The product is also available as an on-demand solution in Google Cloud Launcher, the online marketplace created and operated by Google. According to IDC, the solution enables organizations to create HPC infrastructure without the major capital investments and operating expenses required by new HPC hardware.
The P-GRADE Grid Portal was software for web portals to manage the life-cycle of executing a parallel application in grid computing. It was developed by the MTA SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary, from around 2005 through 2010.
The SHIWA project within grid computing was a project led by the LPDS of MTA Computer and Automation Research Institute. The project coordinator was Prof. Dr. Peter Kacsuk. It started on 1 July 2010 and lasted two years. SHIWA was supported by a grant from the European Commission's FP7 INFRASTRUCTURES-2010-2 call under grant agreement n°261585.
DIET is a software for grid-computing. As middleware, DIET sits between the operating system and the application software. DIET was created in 2000. It was designed for high-performance computing. It is currently developed by INRIA, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, CNRS, Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, SysFera. It is open-source software released under the CeCILL license.
The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a computer software platform for high performance distributed computing. It is developed and distributed directly by the EMI project. It is the base for other grid middleware distributions used by scientific research communities and distributed computing infrastructures all over the world especially in Europe, South America and Asia. EMI supports broad scientific experiments and initiatives, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
A data infrastructure is a digital infrastructure promoting data sharing and consumption.
The Open Commons Consortium is a 501(c)(3) non-profit venture which provides cloud computing and data commons resources to support "scientific, environmental, medical and health care research." OCC manages and operates resources including the Open Science Data Cloud, which is a multi-petabyte scientific data sharing resource. The consortium is based in Chicago, Illinois, and is managed by the 501(c)3 Center for Computational Science Research.
HUBzero is an open source software platform for building websites that support scientific activities.
Science gateways provide access to advanced resources for science and engineering researchers, educators, and students. Through streamlined, online, user-friendly interfaces, gateways combine a variety of cyberinfrastructure (CI) components in support of a community-specific set of tools, applications, and data collections.: In general, these specialized, shared resources are integrated as a Web portal, mobile app, or a suite of applications. Through science gateways, broad communities of researchers can access diverse resources which can save both time and money for themselves and their institutions. As listed below, functions and resources offered by science gateways include shared equipment and instruments, computational services, advanced software applications, collaboration capabilities, data repositories, and networks.