Konya Balazs from Lund Universityin Sweden is giving a tele-presentation on the NorduGrid. It started in 2001-2002 with a research project to enable Grid in the nordic countries. Since 2002 it’s a research collaboration, focusing now on middleware. It develops its own Grid middleware. There are 13 countries participating, with 50 sites and about 5000 cpus.
When the Scandinavian High Energy Physics Institutes wanted to share computing resources and jointly contribute to CERN/LHC computing – they needed a Grid and there was no production ready middleware.
Their design philosophy, followed Scandinavian design phlosophy – lighweight, portable & modular, non-intrusive on the resource side. They wanted something flexible and powerful on the client side – easily installable, trivial tasks must be trivial to perform, no dependency on central services.
The goal was to have no single point of faulure.
He goes on to give some details of the ARC middleware, which is being positioned as general purpose open source European grid middleware. Many national grids in Euripe are using this middleware.
He notes that the major grid middleware providers need to become more dedicated to creating standards for interoperability. – Standards are needed in JJob description language, representation of grid-related objects, a standard interface to computing resources.
Oren Sreebny 