NorduGrid:About

The NorduGrid Collaboration

Collaboration Chairman: Professor Dr. Farid Ould-Saada

Address:
University of Oslo
Department of Physics
Post Office box 1048, Blindern
0316 Oslo
NORWAY
Tel: +47 2285 5056
Fax: +47 2285 6422

Definition

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.

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. NorduGrid develops and deploys a set of tools and services – the so-called ARC middleware, which is a free software.
The goals are:

• Develop and support the ARC middleware.
• Coordinate contributions to the ARC code.
• Define strategical directions for development of the ARC middleware following latest tendencies in the Grid technologies.
• Promote ARC middleware solutions in such areas as Grid development, deployment and usage.
• Contribute to development of Grid standards, e.g. via OGF.

Composition

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.

Membership

A member of the NorduGrid collaboration:

• commits to contribute to the ARC tools and services development, or extends the area of applicability of such by introducing and supporting new application areas;
• participates in day-to-day activities of the 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).

Steering committee

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

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)

Time frame

The collaboration is not time limited.

Location and contacts

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.

Operations

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. Every year, a NorduGrid conference takes place, also at rotating locations.

Resources

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.