HPCwire: TeraGrid '09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration

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July 06, 2009

TeraGrid '09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration

An Integral Component to Achieving the Nation's Vision for Cyberinfrastructure

by Elizabeth Leake, TeraGrid External Relations Coordinator / University of Chicago, Argonne National Lab

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Paul Avery, a recognized leader in advanced grid and networking for science, delivered the first keynote address at the recent TeraGrid '09 conference in Arlington, Va. A professor of physics at the University of Florida, Avery is co-principal investigator and founding member of the Open Science Grid (OSG). Avery talked about the history of OSG, some of the projects that leverage its resources, and OSG's relationship with TeraGrid.

"The OSG is a multicultural consortium -- half technology and half sociology," said Avery.

While the majority of OSG users are from American institutions, 2,500 from 60 countries accessed OSG resources in the past year. From the current rate of usage, it is estimated that researchers will have used tens of petabytes of storage by 2012 and one hundred by 2013. By engaging with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, researchers could need an exabyte of storage by the end of the next decade. Currently there are 5,000 physicists from hundreds of institutes who conduct research at CERN.

The OSG consortium includes science and research communities, national labs, international infrastructures, multidisciplinary (virtual) organizations (VO), technologists, HPC professionals, LHC/CERN experiments, regional and campus infrastructures, education communities as well as computer science and DOE-funded SciDAC projects.

OSG has a distributed facility of 85 resources with approximately 50,000 CPU cores of processing power and about 10 petabytes of disk storage. Its milestones and deliverables are a reflection of its science-driven charter. The leadership of OSG hails jointly from American national laboratory and university involvement where most science is conducted and collaborations are formed. OSG's leadership is collaboratively focused with international and multidisciplinary interactions. The major stakeholders include the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Jointly funded and overseen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), the 2006-2011 OSG project was funded with $30M -- split roughly equally between NSF and DOE. There are 35 full time employees who are directly funded by the OSG project while many more are leveraged via OSG's relationship with consortium members.

Avery offered a brief history of how OSG formed, starting about a decade ago with several NSF- and DOE-funded grid projects. The projects joined forces and in a bottom-up process began deploying test beds and a prototype grid that grew in size and complexity as resources were added from universities, campus grids and national laboratories. At the same time strong links were forged with CERN and the European grid projects to jointly form the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). He spoke of OSG's developing partnerships with regional grids such as New York State Grid and SuraGrid and its collaborations with optical network organizations that provide critical links for high speed data movement.

OSG's campus engagement model was developed by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in North Carolina. By working with campus Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Days and through academic outreach organizations like EDUCAUSE, OSG is communicating its value to colleges and universities. "It seems to be working. Usage stats have doubled since 2008," said Avery.

"Collaboration between TeraGrid and OSG is an integral component to achieving the nation's vision for CI," said Avery as he began to talk about the future of OSG. This vision was articulated in a "dear colleague" letter from the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure on June 9, 2009.

"As an overarching theme, OCI will promote the development of collaborative computational science -- defined broadly to encompass research and development of comprehensive CI in all areas described below, as well as the application of CI to solve complex problems in science and engineering -- as one of OCI's primary missions. OCI will work to provide stewardship for computational science at NSF, in strong collaborations with other offices, directorates, and agencies."

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