ARCHIVED: Project: Open Science Grid Operations

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Primary UITS contact: Rob Quick

Last update: July 3, 2017

Description: The Open Science Grid Consortium is a nationwide facility and infrastructure enabling large-scale high-throughput computing for science. Based at Indiana University, the Grid Operations Center (GOC) provides a single point of operational support for the Open Science Grid (OSG). The GOC performs real-time grid monitoring and problem tracking; provides support to users, developers, and system administrators; maintains grid services; provides security incident response; and maintains information repositories. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began data acquisition in late 2009, offering the opportunity for the GOC to support a high-profile physics community during its ramp-up and while data is flowing.

Outcome: The OSG provides a national research computing infrastructure. As the OSG Operations Center, IU places itself in the center of this expanding national project by improving the access to the OSG and lowering the barrier to its use. It also allows research into the support structures necessary for large grid computing collaborations.

Milestones and status:

  • Originally funded September 1, 2008 to May 31, 2012
  • Newly awarded grant extends this from June 1, 2012 to May 31, 2018

Upcoming events and presentations:

  • OSG The Next Five Years proposal to continue OSG and OSG Grid Operations Center through May 31, 2018 has been awarded.

New projects at IU:

  • MyOSG software launched to provide web-based status, history, and resources summaries to aid scientists in launching and tracking OSG computational jobs via the MyOSG portal.

Comment process:

  • Send comments about OSG operations and management questions to Rob Quick.

Benefits: The goal of the Open Science Grid is to make collaborative scientific research more effective and widespread, stimulate new and transformational approaches to computationally based scientific discovery, and build intellectual capital for future scientific research relying on distributed cyberinfrastructures. The scope of the OSG is to operate, maintain, and evolve an effective, secure high-throughput computational infrastructure and engage existing and new communities to benefit from its use. This heterogeneous, national facility is defined as the set of operational services, software, and processes enabling the contributed resources to act as a coherent distributed system in support of the users.

Client impact: The support services and software tools the OSG GOC provides are the operational glue for the OSG in the United States. Any scientist who wants to use the OSG depends on the GOC to maintain a reliable, secure, easy-to-use environment for undertaking computationally intensive tasks related to the Atlas, CMS, and other physics research related to the Large Hadron Collider, but also in support of other scientific virtual organizations that use the OSG as their computational grid.

Aids achievement of the following Empowering People actions:

  • Recommendation A1
    • Action 4: Cyberinfrastructure. IU should continue to advance its local cyberinfrastructure, its participation in national cyberinfrastructure, and its efforts to win federal funding of cyberinfrastructure programs that enhance IU's research capabilities. (RT leads)
  • Recommendation A4
    • Action 16: External funding. OVPIT should continue to lead and expand its efforts to effectively partner with academic units, campuses, administrative units, or individual investigators for external funding opportunities. (PTI leads; RT supporting)
  • Recommendation C15
    • Action 70: IT-enabled research. IU should purposefully select areas of great and timely promise for strategic development of IT-enabled research, scholarship, and/or creative activity. (PTI leads)
    • Action 71: IT-enabled research resources. IU should identify a base of resources to provide both initial and sustained investments in selected areas for IT-enabled research, scholarship, and/or creative activity. This may include reallocating current resources and developing new ones, including endowments, grants, and/or additional fees. (RT leads)

Project team:

  • Elizabeth Prout
  • Kyle Gross
  • Tom Lee
  • Vince Neal
  • Rob Quick
  • Scott Teige
  • Marina Krenz
  • Sarah Schmiechen
  • Craig Stewart
  • Sarah Engel

Partner sites:

  • Indiana University
  • European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
  • Fermi National Accelerator Lab
  • University of Wisconsin
  • University of Chicago
  • Brookhaven National Lab
  • University of Nebraska
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Governance: Craig Stewart, Associate Dean for Research Technologies, serves as the OSG Council Representative, while Rob Quick oversees the activities of the project at IU. The Grid Operations Center is overseen by the OSG program, Executive Director Frank Wuerthwein (UCSD), and Technical Director Miron Livny (Wisconsin-Madison).

Additional information

  • PI: Rob Quick
  • Funding agency and grant number: University of Wisconsin 647F231 (NSF) and 1148698 (NSF)
  • Funding to UITS: $2,867,000 Initial OSG Grant and $5,552,000 for OSG The Next Five Years
  • Total funding to IU related to this project: $8,419,000 over 12+ years

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 15:49:30.