Nanotechnology Now - News Story: "Open Science Grid"

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October 3rd, 2007

Abstract:
What do you do?

Open Science Grid offers a shared infrastructure of distributed computing resources, independently owned and managed by its members. Together, OSG members provide a virtual facility available to individual research communities, who can add services according to their scientists' needs. OSG delivers the U.S.-based infrastructure to support the Large Hadron Collider experiments.

What is OSG's capacity?

OSG currently has processing and storage resources accessible from more than 50 institutions, including self-operated research Virtual Organizations, campus grids, regional grids and OSG-operated VOs. The OSG is providing about 10,000 CPU days per day in processing and 10 Terabytes per day in data transport. OSG CPU usage is at about 75%.

What jobs do you support?

OSG suits jobs requiring high-throughput processing and data movement. Some OSG sites are now supporting MPI jobs and support for this will be increased in the future. OSG jobs currently come from fields including high energy, nuclear, astro and gravitational wave physics, as well as nanotechnology and bioinformatics.

What middleware and software do you use?

OSG's Virtual Data Toolkit provides packaged, tested and supported collections of middleware for installation on participating compute and storage nodes and a client package for end-user researchers. The package includes Condor, Globus, dCache, Authz, VOMS, GUMS and Gratia. Individual Virtual Organizations can also build their own applications to run on OSG.

Can I access OSG resources?

The OSG Consortium is open to any research or scientific community who wants to participate and contribute. Individual OSG sites set their own policies regarding which OSG members can access their resources. Some sites restrict their resources to a limited set of VOs; others make them available for opportunistic use by all OSG-registered VOs.

How do I get started?

You can start using OSG by joining or forming a VO, registering with OSG, then downloading and installing the OSG software package. At this point you can begin to run jobs and/or register resources. Please contact OSG for more information.

What does the future hold for OSG?

OSG members direct OSG's evolution according to their requirements. To this end, OSG plans to continue to expand its reach, capacity and services to meet the evolving needs of its stakeholders.

Who's backing this project?

The Open Science Grid is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.

- Anne Heavey, OSG