Nordic Data Grid Facility

The Nordic Data Grid Facility, or NDGF, is a collaboration between the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Iceland).

The motivation for NDGF is to ensure that researchers in the Nordic countries can create and participate in computational challenges of scope and size unreachable for the national research groups alone.

History

Nordic Data Grid Facility traces its history back to end-2001, being intrinsically related to the NorduGrid project. Success of the latter indicated need for a larger pan-Nordic facility, with storage resources being of high priority. This need has been addressed by establishing a pilot NDGF infrastructure, which was operational in 2002-2005, and provided distributed storage in addition to the NorduGrid computing resources. During this phase, NDGF committed to provide a Nordic Tier1 (regional computing center) for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project at CERN. Specifics of this Tier1 are such that it has to be an internationally distributed Facility. The Nordic Data Grid Facility in its present function as a provider of the Nordic Grid Infrastructure was established in April 2006 by the Nordic Research Councils. It came into operation on June 1, 2006, and its initial priority is to live up to the original commitment of establishing the Nordic Tier1, with the traditional focus on storage facilities. A large team of developers is meant to assist in Grid middleware development, complementing NorduGrid efforts.

Users and resources

NDGF is a production Grid facility that leverages existing, national computational resources and Grid infrastructures.

To qualify for support research groups should form a Virtual Organization, a VO. The VO provides compute resources for sharing and NDGF operates a Grid interface for the sharing of these resources.

Currently, most computational resources of NDGF are accessible through ARC middleware. Some resources are also available via AliEn software and gLite middleware. Distributed storage facility is realised through dCache storage management solution.

Today, the first operational user of the NDGF is the Nordic High Energy Physics community - the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS Virtual Organizations - through the operation of the Nordic Tier-1, which together with the Tier-0, CERN, and the other 10 Tier-1s collects, stores and processes the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

NDGF is hosted by NORDUnet.

NDGF vs NorduGrid

Many confuse NDGF and NorduGrid - which is not surprising, especially since in its second phase NDGF was proposed to assume the name "NorduGrid". It was however decided to distinguish between the mostly development-oriented project, NorduGrid, and the mostly operations-oriented one, NDGF. As a rule of thumb, NDGF provides mostly services, while NorduGrid provides mostly ARC middleware.

See also

• NorduGrid collaboration, provider of the ARC middleware
• NORDUnet, the NDGF hosting organisation

External links

• NDGF homepage
• CERN, host of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
• dCache, system for storing and retrieving massive data