ARC appeared (and is still often referred to) as the
NorduGrid middleware, originally proposed as an architecture on top of the Globus Toolkit optimized for the needs of
High-Energy Physics computing for the
Large Hadron Collider experiments. First deployment of ARC at the NorduGrid
testbed took place in summer 2002, and by 2003 it was used to support complex computations. The first stable release of ARC (version 0.4) came out in April 2004 under the
GNU General Public License. The name "Advanced Resource Connector" was introduced for this release to distinguish the middleware from the infrastructure. In the same year, the Swedish national Grid project Swegrid became the first large cross-discipline infrastructure to be based on ARC. In 2005, NorduGrid was formally established as a collaboration to support and coordinate ARC development. In 2006 two closely related projects were launched: the
Nordic Data Grid Facility, deploying a pan-Nordic
e-Science infrastructure based on ARC, and KnowARC, focused on transforming ARC into a next generation Grid middleware. ARC v0.6 was released in May 2007, becoming the second stable release. Its key feature was introduction of the client library enabling easy development of higher-level applications. It was also the first ARC release making use of open standards, as it included support for
JSDL. Later that year, the first technology preview of the next generation ARC middleware was made available, though was not distributed with ARC itself. The new approach involved switching to a
Web service based architecture, and in general a very substantial re-factorisation of the core code. In 2008, the NorduGrid consortium adopted the
Apache License for all ARC components. The last stable release in the 0-line was ARC v0.8, shipped in September 2009. It eventually included a preview version of the new execution service - the
A-REX - and several other components, such as
Chelonia,
ISIS,
Charon and the
arcjobtool GUI. In parallel to ARC v0.8, the EU KnowARC project released in November 2009 the conceptual
ARC NOX suite, which was a complete Grid solution, fully based on
Web service technologies. The name NOX actually indicates the release date: November of the
Year of the Ox. ARC 7 was released in March 2025 and while having same interfaces it features a completely redesigned configuration and a new management tool. ==Source code==