Building a Production Grid in Scandinavia

Academic researchers in the Nordic countries participate in many common projects that process large amounts of data. To function effectively, such collaborations need a grid computing infrastructure that works across a wide area and uses distributed resources efficiently. Initial evaluations of existing grid solutions, however, showed that they failed to meet this requirement. The Globus Toolkit (www.globus.org), for example, had no resource brokering capability, and the European Union’s DataGrid project (EDG; www.edg.org) did not satisfy stability and reliability demands. Other grid projects had even less functionality. In May 2001, researchers at Scandinavian and Finnish academic institutes launched the NorduGrid project (www.nordugrid.org), with the goal of building a Nordic testbed for wide-area computing and data handling. We first developed a proposal for an original architecture and implementation.1,2 We then developed middleware based on the Globus libraries and API, adding a set of completely new services such as resource brokering and monitoring. The NorduGrid middleware thus preserves Globus compatibility and permits interoperability with other Globus-based solutions. It also meets our goal of providing a lightweight, yet robust solution that is noninvasive, portable, and requires minimal intervention from system administrators. We launched our testbed in May 2002, and it has been continuously operating since August of that year, providing reliable, round-the-clock services for academic users. NorduGrid spans several countries and incorporates several national computing centers, making it one of the largest operational grids in the world.