• The Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) is general purpose, Open Source, lightweight, portable middleware solution
  • A reliable production-quality and scalable implementation of fundamental Grid services
  • ARC facilitates cross-organisational distributed computing infrastructure solutions
  • Strong commitment to standards and interoperability
  • In continuous use since 2002

ARC design principles

  • User- and performance-driven development:
    • start with something simple that works for users and add functionality gradually
  • Simplicity is a key-word in planning ARC development
  • No single point of failure or bottlenecks - stable by design
  • Non-intrusive and easy to maintain on the server side
    • Tools and utilities respect local policies, in particular, security policies
  • Flexible, powerful and simple on the client side
  • ARC provides a lightweight, stable, robust and fault-tolerant system


ARC development

  • KnowARC is developing the next generation of ARC
  • The established and well performing ARC middleware is gradually replaced by improved and extended components, many based on Web-Services
  • The new ARC components feature:
    • Service Oriented Architecture
    • Modular structure
    • Self-sufficient core components
    • Business friendly open source license (Apache 2.0)
    • Portable – runs on almost all Linux variants, Solaris, porting to Windows and Mac OS in progress
    • Aiming at integration into Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu

Click the image for larger version.

 


Internal structure of ARC components


  • All communication between client and server side is done with web services
  • User clients are developed using the client libraries
  • ARC offers both a command line interface
    (CLI), as well as a GUI
  • Python and Java bindings allows easy development of application-specific clients
  • On the the server side the HED (Hosting Environment Daemon) handles the communication between services and the outside world
  • HED dispatches messages to services which in turn communicate with backends and through them local batch systems
  • Chelonia is the ARC distributed, lightweight, self-healing storage solution.

Click the image for larger version.

More information