Buda Castle, Hungary. Image courtesy of Jan Jelinek, sxc.hu

The annual NorduGrid conference brings together
ARC-related projects and other Grid initiatives outside Northern Europe. (ARC, or Advanced Resource Connector, is an open source software solution distributed under the GPL license, enabling production quality computational and data grids.)

The driving forces behind modern grid development are the needs of high energy physics with its massive data acquisition rates and computing power requirements, all set up in a world-wide distributed manner. The conference takes place at a time when the LHC - arguably the largest ever scientific machine - tunes up, and grids are getting baptised by fire. An overview of grid middlewares and their readiness for this challenge is one of the highlights of the conference.

The European community embraced grid technologies as an important innovation and strives to build a sustainable Grid infrastructure. The forthcoming EU EGI project will rely on a number of major middlewares. To make it possible, the middlewares will have to interoperate. As another highlight of the conference, three such middlewares will be presented.

The Conference is followed by the NGIn Grid School and an ARC technical workshop.