The KnowARC project has announced the Nox release of the Advanced Resource Connector (ARC) Grid middleware. This release brings ARC's new Web Service (WS) based components to a broader audience.

Over the last three years, the KnowARC project has further developed the Advanced Resource Connector Grid middleware, begun by the NorduGrid Collaboration in 2002.

"Some of our new components are already available as part of previous ARC releases, but for the first time all the WS-based new components are released as an integrated, tested, consistent distribution as Nox," said Balazs Konya, KnowARC and NorduGrid Technical Coordinator.

ARC has a broad user community in the Nordic region as well as other countries such as Hungary, Switzerland, Slovakia and the Ukraine, due to its efficiency, portability and user friendliness. The KnowARC project concludes today, but ARC will continue to be developed by NorduGrid through a range of other groups and initiatives.

"ARC is important for a wide range of user communities, like the Nordic DataGrid Facility3 and a number of other National Grid Initiatives4," said Farid Ould-Saada, Director of both KnowARC and NorduGrid. "NorduGrid will continue to coordinate ARC development, and we hope to provide components to the European Grid Infrastructure when it begins next year."

Nox includes a number of innovative components, such as Chelonia, a self-healing, distributed storage system, the ISIS peer-to-peer information system and AREX – a new implementation of the ARC's highly efficient job execution system.

"ARC Nox includes components which are completely new or are both faster and more effective than the components in the previous releases of ARC," said Martin Savko, ARC Release Coordinator.

Nox is a lightweight, modular Grid middleware solution that runs on all major operating systems, including most Linux variants, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

It can be downloaded at http://www.knowarc.eu/nox/ and technical information is online at http://wiki.nordugrid.org/index.php/NOX.