The term ARC Community is used to refer to various groups of people willing to share their computational resources via ARC. A tit-for-tat user group is formalized as a virtual organisation (VO), allowing the mutual use of such community resources.
Contrary to the popular belief, NorduGrid members are not required to provide computing or storage resources; neither offering such resources grants an automatic membership.
Still, ARC community as a whole owns a substantial amount of computing and storage resources. On a voluntarily basis, and for the purpose of the Open Source development process, community members may donate CPU cycles and some storage space to the developers and testers. Such resources constitute the testbed for the ARC middleware.
Other than such donated community resources, NorduGrid does not provide or allocate any computational resources and does not coordinate worldwide deployment of ARC.
Actual deployment and usage of ARC-based distributed computing infrastructures is coordinated by the respective infrastructure projects, such as e.g. NDGF, Swegrid (Sweden), Material Sciences National Grid Infrastructure (M-grid) (Finland), NorGrid (Norway) etc..
Apart from contributing computational resources, many groups develop higher-level software tools on top of ARC (e.g.). This kind of development is not coordinated by NorduGrid, but assistance is provided by the Collaboration upon request.
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