[2] ARC-CE functionality includes data staging and caching, developed in order to support data-intensive distributed computing.

[1] ARC appeared (and is still often referred to) as the NorduGrid middleware, originally proposed as an architecture on top of the Globus Toolkit[4] optimized for the needs of High-Energy Physics computing for the Large Hadron Collider experiments.

In the same year, the Swedish national Grid project Swegrid became the first large cross-discipline infrastructure to be based on ARC.

[12] The new approach involved switching to a Web service based architecture, and in general a very substantial re-factorisation of the core code.

[15] 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.

[20] ARC is free software available from the NorduGrid public repository, both as binary packages for a variety of Linux systems and source, as well as on GitHub.

[23] In 2010-2013, several key ARC components - most notably, HED, A-REX, clients and libraries - were included in the European Middleware Initiative (EMI) software stack.

Through EMI, ARC became a part of the Unified Middleware Distribution (UMD) of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI).

ARC is the basis of the computing infrastructure of the Nordic Data Grid Facility (NDGF), which constitutes a Tier1 center of WLCG.