History
ARC appeared (and is still often referred to) as the NorduGrid middleware, originally proposed as an architecture on top of the Globus Toolkit optimized for the needs of High-Energy Physics computing for the Large Hadron Collider experiments. First deployment of ARC at the NorduGrid testbed took place in summer 2002, and by 2003 it was used to support complex computations.
The first stable release of ARC (version 0.4) came out in April 2004 under the GNU General Public License. The name "Advanced Resource Connector" was introduced for this release to distinguish the middleware from the infrastructure. In the same year, the Swedish national Grid project Swegrid became the first large cross-discipline infrastructure to be based on ARC.
In 2005, NorduGrid was formally established as a collaboration to support and coordinate ARC development. In 2006 two closely related projects were launched: the Nordic Data Grid Facility, deploying a pan-Nordic e-Science infrastructure based on ARC, and KnowARC, focused on transforming ARC into a next generation Grid middleware.
ARC v0.6 was released in May 2007, becoming the second stable release. Its key feature was introduction of the client library enabling easy development of higher-level applcations. It was also the first ARC release making use of open standards, as it included support for JSDL. Later that year, the first technology preview of the next generation ARC middleware was made available, though was not distributed with ARC itself. The new approach involved switching to a Web service based architecture, and in general a very substantial re-factorisation of the core code.
In 2008, the NorduGrid consortium adopted the Apache License for all ARC components.
The last stable release in the 0-line was ARC v0.8, shipped in September 2009. It eventually included a preview version of the new execution service - the A-REX' - and several other components, like Chelonia, ISIS, Charon' and the arcjobtool GUI.
In parallel to ARC v0.8, the EU KnowARC project released in November 2009 the conceptual ARC NOX suite, which was a complete Grid solution, fully based on Web service technologies. The name NOX actually indicates the release date: November of the Year of the Ox.
In May 2011, NorduGrid released ARC v11.05 (adopting Ubuntu versioning scheme this time). This release marked the complete transition from the old execution service to A-REX and accompanying services. For backwards compatibility with the existing infrastructures, old interfaces for the execution service and the information system were retained.
Read more about this topic: Advanced Resource Connector
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