The NorduGrid Collaboration

Collaboration Chairman: Professor Dr. Farid Ould-Saada
e-mail:
Technical coordinator: Dr. Balázs Kónya
e-mail:
Address:
University of Oslo
Department of Physics
Post Office box 1048, Blindern
0316 Oslo
NORWAY
Tel: +47 2285 5056
Fax: +47 2285 6422

Definition

The NorduGrid Collaboration coordinates the development of Advance Resource Connector (ARC) - an open source Grid middleware. The collaboration is based on the Collaboration Agreement.

Background

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.

Objectives

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 - the ARC middleware, a free open source software.
The Collaboration goals are:

Composition

As the name suggests, the Collaboration was originally established by several Nordic academic and research organisations, but was always open to new members. The new Collaboration Agreement signed in 2011 has 11 partners from 10 countries, and new members are welcomed.

Membership

Membership is regulated by the Collaboration Agreement; in general, a member of the NorduGrid Collaboration:

Strategic coordination is done by the Steering Board, and development efforts are coordinated by the Technical Coordination Group.

Collaboration members

The Collaboration has full members, who commit to carry out specific tasks and duties, and observers, who contribute on a case-by-case basis. All the members are represented in the Steering Board.

The current NorduGrid membership and Steering Board composition is:

MemberDeputyOrganisationRole
Dr. Anders WäänänenMr. Martin Skou AndersenNiels Bohr Institute, Denmark 
Prof. Paula EerolaDr. Miika TuiskuHelsinki Institute of Physics, Finland 
Dr. Vaidas GiedrimasProf. Algimantas JuozapaviciusLitGrid, Lithuania 
Prof. Farid Ould-SaadaProf. Alex ReadUniversity of Oslo, Norwaychair
Dr. Jozef ČernákRNDr. Marek KočanPavol Jozef Šafárik University, Slovakia 
Prof. Andrej FilipcicMr. Jan Jona JavorsekJožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia 
Dr. Oxana SmirnovaDr. Balázs KónyaLund University, Sweden 
Prof. Richard BrennerDr. Mattias EllertUppsala University, Sweden 
Dr. Sigve HaugDr. Gianfranco SciaccaSwiNG, Switzerland 
Prof. Oleksandr KorneliukDr. Ievgen SliusarUkrainian National Grid 
Dr. Grigorij Feofilov St. Petersburg State University, Russiaobserver
Dr. Gudmund Høst NeICobserver
Steering Board procedures are regulated by the Collaboration Agreement.

Technical coordination group

ARC development is coordinated on daily basis by the Technical Coordination Group consisting of key experts appointed by the NorduGrid community.

Time frame

The Collaboration is not time limited.

Relation to other projects

NorduGrid takes part and strives to support various projects that help development and proliferation of Grid middleware in general and ARC products in particular.

The European Middleware Initiative (EMI) is a unique project bringing together major European middleware providers: gLite, UNICORE, dCache and ARC.

The Nordic Tier-1 within the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) evolved from the early NorduGrid testbed, and nowadays is a key Nordic computing facility, offering computing and storage resources to LHC computing and many other e-Science projects. NeIC is also among key ARC contributors.

ARC middleware is used for various Grid facilities, such as the SWEGRID (Sweden), Swiss National Grid Association (SwiNG), Material Sciences National Grid Infrastructure (M-grid) (Finland), NORGrid (Norway), Ukrainian National Grid.

NorduGrid cooperates with other Grid projects, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE), European Grid Initiative (EGI), Unicore, Open Science Grid Consortium (OSG) and Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Among past projects, the EU KnowARC (2006-2009) must be mentioned as a major driving force behind modernisation of ARC. EU BalticGrid II project (2008-2010) had an MoU with NorduGrid, helping promoting it in Baltic states. The Nordunet3 NGIn project (2006-2011) focused on education and training aspects, as well as on development of new solutions based on ARC.

Location and contacts

The NorduGrid collaboration is distributed across several countries by its nature. For administrative issues, the Steering Board 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.

Operations

The collaboration members communicate on a daily basis via E-mail, phone calls and video conferences. Technical Coordination Group holds weekly telecons and organizes face-to-face technical workshops at rotating locations. The Steering Board holds regular phone and face-to-face meetings. NorduGrid also organises an annual Collaboration conference. Meeting schedules and past events can be found from the dedicated page.

Resources

It is not required to provide computing or storage resources to become a collaboration member; nor 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.

World-wide resources deploying ARC middleware are not subject to the NorduGrid Collaboration funding, rules or policies. The world-wide ARC middleware deployment is not regulated by NorduGrid: no allocations or authorisations can be granted or guaranteed by the NorduGrid, neither does NorduGrid carry responsibility for eventual incidents except of the ARC software flaws.



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