Building and Operating a Distributed Regional Centre for LHC Computing and Data Storage

The paper describes the overall design and implementation of the geographically distributed computing and data storage centre as built by the Nordic Data Grid Facility (NDGF) with the driving goal to serve the needs of the Large Hadron Collider research at CERN. In striving to federate heterogeneous resources in different administrative domains, NDGF chose to create an infrastructure using software services offered by different providers: ARC for computing, dCache for storage, SGAS for usage accounting, and elements of gLite for interoperability with the worldwide LHC Computing Grid.