Building the International Lattice Data Grid

We present the International Lattice Data Grid (ILDG), a loosely federated grid-of-grids for sharing data from Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) simulations. The ILDG comprises of metadata, file-format and web-service standards, which can be used to wrap regional data-grid interfaces, allowing seamless access to catalogues and data in a diverse set of collaborating regional grids. We discuss the technological underpinnings of the ILDG, primarily the metadata and the middleware, and offer a critique of its various aspects with the hindsight of the design work and the two years of production. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.