Oxana Smirnova

"The switch from physics to computing was rather smooth," said Smirnova. "I had been doing data analysis, which is mostly programming and data processing, before I switched to grid computing. Of course I was also doing some hardware work and detector shifts, but most of my work was already on computers. Now, as a user, I explain to the computer science programmers what I need from them, which is a complicated task."

Lund University became interested in grid computing at the start of the EU Data Grid project. NorduGrid—short for a three-line project name used in the initial proposal—was born when physicists from Lund University and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark met at an EU Data Grid meeting. The collaboration now includes physicists from five universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden who are involved in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

The NorduGrid collaboration has developed its own middleware, in use for continuous production since 2002. Called the Advanced Resource Connector, the software is freely available at their Web site.

"The idea was to make the ARC simple, portable and installable on any operating system," said Smirnova. "The client was assumed to be a physicist or other scientist not experienced with any grid technology."

While the NorduGrid collaboration is made up of particle physicists, scientists from many other disciplines benefit from the collaboration's work through the ARC middleware. ARC has been installed by researchers in Japan, Canada and Australia and is the middleware for Swegrid, a Swedish national computational grid.

Learn more at the NorduGrid Web site. To see the monitoring system developed by Smirnova, click on "Grid Monitor" at the top of the screen.