Advanced Resource Connector middleware for lightweight computational Grids

As computational Grids move away from the prototyping state, reliability, performance and ease of use and maintenance become focus areas of their adoption. In this paper, we describe ARC (Advanced Resource Connector) Grid middleware, where these issues have been given special consideration.We present an in-depth view of the existing components of ARC, and discuss some of the new components, functionalities and enhancements currently under development. This paper also describes architectural and technical choices that have been made to ensure scalability, stability and high performance. The core components of ARC have already been thoroughly tested in demanding production environments, where it has been in use since 2002. The main goal of this paper is to provide a first comprehensive description of ARC.