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Collaboration Chairman:
Professor
Dr. Farid Ould-Saada
e-mail: |
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Technical coordinator:
Dr. Balázs
Kónya
e-mail: |
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Address:
University of Oslo Department of Physics Post Office box 1048, Blindern 0316 Oslo NORWAY Tel: +47 2285 5056 Fax: +47 2285 6422 |
NorduGrid is a Grid Research and Development collaboration aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free Grid middleware, known as the Advance Resource Connector (ARC). The collaboration is based on the Memorandum of Understanding.
The NorduGrid collaborative activity is based on the success of the project known as the "Nordic Testbed for Wide Area Computing and Data Handling", and aims at continuation and development of its achievements. That project was launched in May 2001, aiming to build a Grid infrastructure suitable for production-level research tasks. The project developers came up with an original architecture and implementation, which allowed the testbed to be set up accordingly in May 2002, and remain in continuous operation and development since August 2002.
The aim of the NorduGrid collaboration is to deliver a
robust, scalable, portable and fully featured solution for a
global computational and data Grid system. NorduGrid develops
and deploys a set of tools and services – the so-called ARC middleware, which is a free
software.
The goals are:
The core of the collaboration historically consists of several Nordic academic and research institutes. The membership is open to any other institute or other body anywhere in the World, which agrees to the terms listed below.
A member of the NorduGrid collaboration:
To become a member, the candidate organisation should identify itself with a task along the lines above, and contact the technical group to coordinate the planned efforts. The technical group then recommends the candidate to the steering committee, which formalizes the membership in an appropriate manner.
Membership does not automatically guarantee a seat in the steering committee.
Membership expires after an extended period of member's inactivity (decided by the collaboration on a case-by-case basis).
The NorduGrid steering committee consists of representatives
of the member organisations. Currently, the members are:
Prof. Paula Eerola, Lund University
Prof. Tord Ekelöf, Uppsala University
Prof. Farid Ould-Saada, University of Oslo (chair)
Dr. Miika Tuisku, Helsinki Institute of Physics
Dr. Anders Wäänänen, ICE (at NBI)
Chairperson of the committee (the
Coordinator) is appointed by consensus of the
collaboration. The committee helds regular meetings. Steering
committee represents the collaboration outside, coordinates
personnel available for the collaboration, manages funds
granted to it, and negotiates new memberships.
Technical coordination group consists of developers actively contributing to the code. The
group is chaired by the technical coordinator, appointed
by consensus of the collaboration. The task of the technical
group is to do whatever it takes to make Grid a reality. Currently, the group members are:
Dr. Mattias Ellert
Dr. Michael Grønager
Dr. Aleksandr Konstantinov
Dr. Balázs Kónya (technical coordinator)
Dr. Jakob Langgaard Nielsen
Dr. Oxana Smirnova
Dr. Anders Wäänänen (codekeeper)
The collaboration is not time limited.
The NorduGrid collaboration is distributed across several countries by its nature. For administrative issues, the steering committee should be contacted through its chairperson (coordinator), and for the technical issues, the contact is the technical coordinator. The general entry point for the collaboration is its Web site, http://www.nordugrid.org, which lists all the contact information.
The collaboration members communicate on a daily basis via E-mail, phone calls and video conferences. The steering committee holds regular phone meetings to discuss organisational issues. The technical group organizes meetings at rotating locations approximately every other month. Twice a year, a joint collaboration workshop takes place, also at rotating locations.
It is not required to provide computing or storage resources to become a collaboration member; neither offering such resources guarantees the membership.
NorduGrid members typically own a certain amount of computing and storage resources. They also may rent CPU cycles and storage facilities from their national providers and host institutes. Such resources constitute the testbed for the ARC middleware.
Resources deploying ARC middleware are not subject to the NorduGrid collaboration funding, rules or policies. The world-wide Grid based on ARC middleware is not regulated by NorduGrid (e.g., no allocations or authorisations can be granted or guaranteed by the NorduGrid), and will henceforth be referred to as ARC-Grid.