Science Grid This Week

July 20, 2005

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Calendar/Meetings

July 2005

10-22, Third International Summer School on Grid Computing, Naples, Italy

18-22, Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists, SDSC, San Diego, California

20-22, Open Science Grid Consortium Meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

20-22, Second International Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences, University of California, San Diego, California

24-27, 14th IEEE Int'l Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina

25-29, 11th Annual San Diego Supercomputing Center Summer Institute, University of California, San Diego, California

Full Calendar

Image of the Week

Poster from the Lepton Photon 2003 symposium. (Click on image for larger version.)
Courtesy Fermilab

One of a series of grid computing posters exhibited at the Lepton Photon particle physics symposium at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 2003. The series showed how grid computing will allow particle physicists all over the world to access and analyze their data to study the fundamental properties of particles and forces.

Link of the Week

So You Want to Set Up a Grid
Thinking about setting up your own grid? Need some advice? One of the "On the Grid" columns in ClusterWorld magazine discusses some rules of thumb to consider and presents some grid computing basics.

PDF Version for Printing

RSS Headlines

Feature Story

Now Open for Scientific Research: Open Science Grid

Opening the Open Science Grid (left to right): Abbas Ourmazd, Craig Tull, Frank Wuerthwein, Kevin Thompson, Randy Ruchti.

The Open Science Grid Consortium today officially inaugurated the Open Science Grid, a national grid computing infrastructure for large scale science. The OSG is built and operated by teams from U.S. universities and national laboratories, and is open to small and large research groups nationwide from many different scientific disciplines.

The Consortium currently has over 20 member organizations contributing manpower and resources to a common cyberinfrastructure. Research groups that join the Consortium contribute to the use and operation of the OSG and have access to shared resources. The OSG includes over 10,000 CPUs and access to many terabytes of data storage. Initial funding comes from a variety of sources through member organizations.

U.S. participants in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, currently being built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, invest heavily in advancing OSG capabilities and development schedule. Other projects in physics, astrophysics, gravitational-wave science and biology contribute to the grid and benefit from advances in grid technologies. The services provided by the OSG will be further enriched as new projects and scientific communities join the Consortium.

"We're doing something unique--the OSG is a working national-scale computing facility that was built from the bottom up and serves a diverse community of researchers," said Paul Avery from the University of Florida, leader of the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory and a member of the OSG Council.

The OSG is an evolution of Grid3, which has been running for almost two years. Grid3 and OSG include the efforts of the National Science Foundation-funded iVDGL and Grid Physics Network, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science-funded Particle Physics Data Grid.

GGF14 Features Science Gateways and Applications

The GGF Town Hall Meeting.
Image Courtesy Ann Collins, GGF

Making the grid accessible to scientific researchers and students was a highlight of the 14th Global Grid Forum, held June 27-30 in Chicago, Illinois. This GGF event was the first to include a diverse community program featuring science and education, where members of the global scientific and grid computing community gathered to share experiences with scientific gateways and portals to grid computing resources.

"The GGF has a pretty rich tradition of involving science and supporting the different sciences," said Mark Linesch, GGF Chair. "We'd heard from a variety of people the desire to talk about portals and gateways as a way to make the grid more accessible to expert and non-expert users. Now at each GGF event we're putting together an extensive community program that explores issues specific to unique communities, and also those that cut across multiple communities."

The community sessions included over 15 presentations from scientific applications, including nanoscience, particle physics, atmospheric science and computational science. Other sessions focused on African research and education grids, education communities and the grid, space-related grid applications and supporting more new communities in GGF.