The Nordic Data Grid Facility, or NDGF, is a common

e-Science E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable dist ...

infrastructure provided by the Nordic countries (

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

and

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

) for scientific computing and data storage. It is the first and so far only internationally distributed WLCG Tier1 center, providing computing and storage services to experiments at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

History

Nordic Data Grid Facility traces its history back to end-2001, being intrinsically related to the

NorduGrid NorduGrid is a collaboration aiming at development, maintenance and support of the free Grid middleware, known as the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC). History The name ''NorduGrid'' first became known in 2001 as short for the project called ...

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

computing resources. During this phase, NDGF committed to provide a Nordic Tier1 (regional computing center) for the Worldwide

LHC The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundre ...

Computing Grid project at

. 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. NDGF team includes software experts who take part in various Grid middleware development. In 2012 NDGF became a part of a wider initiative, the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration.

Users and operations

NDGF Tier1 is a production

Grid Grid, The Grid, or GRID may refer to: Common usage * Cattle grid or stock grid, a type of obstacle is used to prevent livestock from crossing the road * Grid reference, used to define a location on a map Arts, entertainment, and media * News g ...

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 Tier1 operates a Grid interface for the sharing of these resources. Currently, most computational resources of NDGF Tier1 are accessible through

ARC ARC may refer to: Business * Aircraft Radio Corporation, a major avionics manufacturer from the 1920s to the '50s * Airlines Reporting Corporation, an airline-owned company that provides ticket distribution, reporting, and settlement services * ...

middleware. Some resources are also available via

AliEn Alien primarily refers to: * Alien (law), a person in a country who is not a national of that country ** Enemy alien, the above in times of war * Extraterrestrial life, life which does not originate from Earth ** Specifically, intelligent extrater ...

software. Distributed storage facility is realised through

dCache dCache is a system for storing and retrieving huge amounts of data, distributed among a large number of heterogeneous server nodes, under a single virtual filesystem tree with a variety of standard access methods. dCache is open source software bu ...

storage management solution. Today, the dominant user community of the NDGF Tier1 is the High Energy Physics - the

ALICE Alice may refer to: * Alice (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Literature * Alice (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland''), a character in books by Lewis Carroll * ''Alice'' series, children's and teen books by ...

ATLAS An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic ...

and

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2 (programming language), used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum collection * Color managem ...

Virtual Organizations - through the operation of the Nordic Tier1, which together with the Tier0,

, and the other 12 Tier1s collects, stores and processes the data produced by the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

. Since 2010, NDGF Tier1 is a part of the

European Grid Infrastructure European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international rese ...

. NDGF Tier1 was hosted by

NORDUnet NORDUnet is an international collaboration between the National research and education networks in the Nordic countries. Members The members of NORDUnet are: * SUNET of Sweden * UNINETT of Norway * FUNET of Finland * Forskningsnettet of De ...

in 2006-2011, and since 2012 is hosted by NordForsk.{{cite web , url=http://www.nordforsk.org/en , title=NordForsk

NDGF vs NorduGrid

Many confuse NDGF and

- 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,

, and the mostly operations-oriented one, NDGF. As a rule of thumb, NDGF provides mostly services, while

provides mostly

middleware.

References

External links

NDGF Tier-1 page

CERN
host of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid
dCache
system for storing and retrieving massive data Distributed computing projects Grid computing Information technology organizations based in Europe

History

Users and operations

NDGF vs NorduGrid

See also

References

External links