Anders Wäänänen

The NorduGrid architecture and middleware for scientific applications

The NorduGrid project operates a production Grid infrastructure in Scandinavia and Finland using own innovative middleware solutions. The resources range from small test clusters at academic institutions to large farms at several supercomputer centers, and are used for various scientific applications. This talk reviews the architecture and describes the Grid services, implemented via the NorduGrid middleware.

The NorduGrid project: using Globus toolkit for building GRID infrastructure

The NorduGrid is the pioneering Grid project in Scandinavia. The purpose of the project is to create a Grid computing infrastructure in Nordic countries. The cornerstone of the infrastructure adopted at NorduGrid is the Globus toolkit developed at Argonne National Laboratory and University of Southern California. It is, however, missing several important high-level services. With the need to provide working production system, NorduGrid has developed its own solution for the most essential parts. An early prototype implementation of the proposed architecture is being tested and further developed. Aiming at simple but yet functional system capable of handling common computational problems encountered in the Nordic scientific communities, we were choosing simple, but still functional solutions with the necessary parts implemented first.

The Nordugrid production grid infrastructure, status and plans

Nordugrid offers reliable grid services for academic users over an increasing set of computing & storage resources spanning through the Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. A small group of scientists has already been using the Nordugrid as their daily computing utility. In the near future we expect a rapid growth both in the number of active users and available resources thanks to the recently launched Nordic grid projects.We report on the present status and short term plans of the Nordic grid infrastructure and describe the available and foreseen resources, grid services and our forming user base.

Building a production grid in Scandanavia

Innovative middleware solutions are key to the NorduGrid testbed, which spans academic institutes and supercomputing centers throughout Scandinavia and Finland and provides continuous grid services to its users.

An Overview of an Architecture Proposal for a High Energy Physics Grid

This document gives an overview of a Grid testbed architecture proposal for the NorduGrid project [1]. The aim of the project is to establish an inter-Nordic testbed facility for implementation of wide area computing and data handling. The architecture is supposed to define a Grid system suitable for solving data intensive problems at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN [2]. We present the various architecture components needed for such a system. After that we go on to give a description of the dynamics by showing the task flow.

International grid CA interworking, peer review and policy management through the european datagrid certification authority coordination group

The Certification Authority Coordination Group in the European DataGrid project has created a large-scale Public Key Infrastructure and the policies and procedures to operate it successfully. The infrastructure demonstrates interoperability of multiple certification authorities (CAs) in a novel system of peer-assessment of the roots of trust. Crucial to the assessment is the definition of minimum requirements that all CAs must meet in order to be accepted. The evaluation is aided by software-generated trust matrices. Related work building on this infrastructure is described. The groups policies and experience now form the basis of the new European Policy Management Authority for Grid Authentication in e-Science.

Roadmap for the ARC grid middleware

The Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) or the NorduGrid middleware is an open source software solution enabling production quality computational and data Grids, with special emphasis on scalability, stability, reliability and performance. Since its first release in May 2002, the middleware is deployed and being used in production environments. This paper aims to present the future development directions and plans of the ARC middleware in terms of outlining the software development roadmap.

Data management services of NorduGrid

In common grid installations, services responsible for storing big data chunks, replication of those data and indexing their availability are usually completely decoupled. And a task of synchronizing data is passed to either user-level tools or separate services (like spiders) which are subject to failure and usually cannot perform properly if one of underlying services fails too. The NorduGrid Smart Storage Element (SSE) was designed to try to overcome those problems by combining the most desirable features into one service. It uses HTTPS/G for secure data transfer, Web Services for control (through same HTTPS/G channel) and can provide information to indexing services used in middlewares based on the Globus Toolkit (TM). At the moment, those are the Replica Catalog and the Replica Location Service. The modular internal design of the SSE and the power of C++ object programming allows to add support for other indexing services in an easy way. There are plans to complement it with a Smart Indexing Service capable of resolving inconsistencies hence creating a robust distributed data storage system. (Less)

The Case for a Simpler Security Model in Grid Computing

Todays de facto standard for assigning trust, involving X.509 proxy credentials and virtual organizations, is analyzed and found to present a number of problems. A model is proposed which is simpler and has less inherent security risks while still providing the functionality needed by current grid applications.

Recent ARC developments: through modularity to interoperability

The Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) middleware introduced by NorduGrid is one of the basic Grid solutions used by scientists worldwide. While being well-proven in daily use by a wide variety of scientific applications at large-scale infrastructures like the Nordic DataGrid Facility (NDGF) and smaller scale projects, production ARC of today is still largely based on conventional Grid technologies and custom interfaces introduced a decade ago. In order to guarantee sustainability, true cross-system portability and standards-compliance based interoperability, the ARC community undertakes a massive effort of implementing modular Web Service (WS) approach into the middleware. With support from the EU KnowARC project, new components were introduced and the existing key ARC services got extended with WS technology based standard-compliant interfaces following a service-oriented architecture. Such components include the hosting environment framework, the resource-coupled execution service, the re-engineered client library, the self-healing storage solution and the peer-to-peer information system, to name a few. Gradual introduction of these new services and client tools into the production middleware releases is carried out together with NDGF and thus ensures a smooth transition to the next generation Grid middleware. Standard interfaces and modularity of the new component design are essential for ARC contributions to the planned Universal Middleware Distribution of the European Grid Initiative.