Content about Open Science Grid

  Images of the week - Scenes from SC07 Pumping at the pinnacle of energy, innovation and computing power, SC07 is serving up the latest and greatest in IT to a record crowd this week in Reno, Nevada.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Stony Brook University team are all smiles just prior to beginning their 44-hour race against the clock and five other undergraduate teams as part of the Cluster Challenge.Image courtesy of Douglas Mansell The Enabling Grids for E-sciencE stand showcases the achievements of EGEE, a project which brings together partners from 45 countries to create a grid strongly focused on interoperability and accessibility.Image courtesy of Jerry Newton Photography The Fermilab team, members of Open Science Grid, are demonstrating high bandwidth Tier-1 to Tier-2 LHC data transmission. The OSG duck can be found on OSG member stands throughout the exhibition.Image courtesy of John Urish Projects including AstroGrid, OMII, National Grid Service, NaCTeM, the London e-Science Centre and GridPP are highl

  Opinion - Celebrating one year of International Science Grid This Week iSGTW celebrates one year of reporting on grid computing initiatives across the globe. In the last six months, visits to the iSGTW Web site have increased almost six-fold and are continuing to rise. Images courtesy of iSGTWThis issue, International Science Grid This Week celebrates its first anniversary. Since our launch last year, interest in grids, cyberinfrastructure and distributed computing has skyrocketed. As one indicator, visits to the iSGTW.org site have increased almost six-fold over the last six months. The number of scientists using grid computing is also increasing, as is the level of resources now available to them.In the last year, the number of jobs run on the UK’s GridPP has more than doubled to approach one million jobs during October 2007. Altogether, in the last twelve months GridPP computers have run the equivalent of 26 million normalized CPU hours.The Open Science Grid e-infrastructure is now averaging 80,000 jobs a day&md

Announcement - OSG site administrators to discuss deployment of OSG 0.8.0 Fermilab, or the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is a member of the OSG consortium and the venue for the December site administrators meeting.Image courtesy of FermilabOpen Science Grid site adminstrators will be meeting 12 and 13 December at Fermilab, Illinois, to discuss deployment of OSG 0.8.0 as well as to exchange experiences and challenges and plan for the second year of Open Science Grid.The program includes presentations from Rob Gardner of the University of Chicago, Tod Tanenbaum from the University of Wisconsin, Chris Green from Fermilab and Rob Quick from Indiana University.Anyone interested in deploying the OSG software or providing processing or storage resources for the OSG are welcomed to attend the meeting. Please contact OSG for more information. 

  Feature - Grids work like a CHARMM for molecular dynamics X-ray crystallography at room temperature revealed only one water molecule (shown as a red sphere) near the protein residue of interest (shown in the box). The protein is a variant of staphylococcal nuclease. Images courtesy of Johns Hopkins University In 1963, Richard Feynman said that “everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jiggling and wiggling of atoms.” (1)  Molecular dynamics aims to better understand these jiggles and wiggles, using numerical methods to simulate the ways in which atoms and molecules move. One tool facilitating this work is CHARMM—or Chemistry at HARvard Macromolecular Mechanics—a software application developed at Harvard University for modeling the structure and behavior of molecular systems.CHARMM has multiple applications, but for Ana Damjanovic of the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., molecular dynamics simulations are the name o

  Feature - Keeping up with Moore’s Law The NanoWire user interface.Image courtesy of nanoHUB Silicon nanowire transistors are promising devices for future integrated circuits. Researchers in this field are interested in geometries and properties of materials that vary on an atomic length scale; they study quantum states and the relationship between voltages and currents at these scales.  But not all nano-device engineers are nuts for computers. Many prefer to let other people worry about the computational end of things. Since this research depends heavily on simulations of nano-device behavior under varying conditions, the door is wide open for the development of accessible and intuitive computational tools.Enter Gerhard Klimeck of Purdue University, technical director of the National Science Foundation Network for Computational Nanotechnology. Klimeck and his colleagues have developed the user-friendly NanoWire computational tool, accessible via the web-based nanoHUB.  On nanoHUB, researchers set up a NanoW

  Feature - ATLAS: the data chain works Tracks recorded in the muon chambers of the ATLAS detector can now be expressed to physicists all over the world, enabling simultaneous analysis at sites across the globe. The European and U.S. sites are connected via the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and Open Science Grid infrastructures.Image courtesy of ATLAS This month particle physics experiment ATLAS went “end-to-end” for the first time. Buried in Switzerland, 90 meters under the ground at the base of the French Jura mountains, ATLAS (A Torroidal LHC ApparatuS) is one of four high energy physics experiments attached to the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer particle accelerator nearing the final stages of completion.When the LHC is turned on, physicists worldwide will be waiting by their computers. They’ll be expecting express and non-stop delivery of massive amounts of data, streamed in a virtually seamless sequence direct to their doorstep.And this month, for the first time, ATLAS proved that this data dist

  Feature - Joining the dots: creating interoperable grids Interoperability is now making grids bigger and more able than ever before.Images courtesy of OSG (top) and Marijke Unger (bottom)Pooling computers into grids is enabling scientific discoveries that would not otherwise be possible. Always looking to the future, grid developers are now asking: is there a compelling case for connecting these grids together?As grid usage grows and more researchers discover grid power, many predict that scientific appetite for this power will also grow. Already satisfying large appetites as individual ventures, two U.S.-based grids—Open Science Grid and TeraGrid—agree that interoperability between their infrastructures is the next step.The interoperative idealTo a scientist, grid interoperability should mean nothing beyond reliable and continuous access to highly responsive computing and data storage resources. These resources, provided by one or any number of computing grids, could ideally respond interchangeably to user requ

  Feature - Many millions of manuscripts: data mining and digitized objects As this Computation Institute conference room wall suggests, pen and “paper” is still a popular way to record information. But, as is also suggested, digitization can offer much in the way of improving the accessibility and utility of written materials.Image courtesy of the Computation Institute. Just three years old, the Computation Institute’s Teraport has already consumed 2.5 million hours of computing time on more than 800,000 jobs.James Evans, Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago, is a Teraport regular, routinely occupying up to 30 processors at a time for his work on citation network analysis.Multiplying resultsCrunching through hundreds of CPU hours, Evans identifies patterns of interaction between universities and the biotechnology industry, using Teraport to compare the citations of every article with those of every other article in his database—more than 25 million citations.In work that re

Link of the week - Open Science Grid: a collaborative approach Total jobs per Virtual Organization: Plot showing number of simultaneous jobs running on Open Science Grid computing facilities for a recent six–month period. Each color denotes jobs run by a distinct Virtual Organization.Image courtesy of Open Science Grid Open Science Grid: Building and Sustaining General Cyberinfrastructure Using a Collaborative Approach is a paper discussing the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid. Published in June in First Monday, it covers:An introduction to Open Science GridPractical lessons learned from operating a large cyberinfrastructureScalability, scalability, scalabilityChallenges faced by Open Science Grid“OSG’s experience broadly illustrates the breadth and scale of effort that a diverse, evolving collaboration must undertake in building and sustaining large–scale cyberinfrastructure serving multiple communities,” writes author Paul Avery, a professor at the University of Florida and resource m

  Feature - Summer of learning: what’s with all these grid schools? Grid summer schools are a catalyst for the creation of long-lasting international and inter-disciplinary networks. This image was taken at the Biomed GRID School, held 14-19 May 2007, in Varenna, Italy.Image courtesy of David FergussonIt’s that time of year again: the snow melts, the skies turn blue, and grid summer schools appear across the planet. David Fergusson is something of an old hand when it comes to grid education: he has organised and attended numerous training events, workshops and summer schools; managed the NA3 Training Activity as part of EGEE; and is currently the deputy director for Training Outreach and Education at the National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, UK, as well as the Manager of ICEAGE, a project dedicated to advanced grid education events. Fergusson found time between summer schools to chat with EGEE’s Alison McCall.Alison McCall: Why hold grid summer schools?David Fergusson: Grid summer schools bring together expe

  Feature - Protein origami: function follows form One protein can fold in many ways. This computationally designed protein switches between a zinc finger structure and a coiled-coil structure, depending on its environment.Image courtesy of Kuhlman LaboratoryScientists in the Kuhlman Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are using the Open Science Grid to perform protein origami. They’re running Rosetta: a powerful tool for predicting and designing the incredibly complex three-dimensional structures that proteins can adopt.Why does protein folding matter? If you change the way a protein is folded, you can change the way it functions, and can even stop it from functioning at all.Nature’s ultimate nano-machinesProteins are nature’s ultimate nano-machines, performing sophisticated functions on a scale much smaller than any machine we can construct.  They can speed up chemical reactions, turn chemical energy into mechanical force, regulate the way cells grow and divide, and even fo

  Feature - DZero: Doing Double DutySummer 2006: A new layer of silicon detector is ready to fit in the center of the DZero detector.Image courtesy of Dmitri Densiov, FermilabOn the hunt for physics beyond the Standard Model, some DZero physicists search for traces of super-symmetry, lepto-quarks, quark substructure and other curiosities. Others continue to probe the Model, the theoretical backbone of modern high energy physics, by making ever more precise measurements. DZero, located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Illinois, U.S., is a “general-purpose high energy physics experiment.” As such, the DZero detector slices and dices a broad range of particles and phenomena that only Fermilab’s Tevatron, currently the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, can produce.Last summer the DZero detector was treated to a substantial upgrade, including the addition of new components. After any significant change to a detector, a precise calibration is required to properly quantify subsequent data.&n