Funding boost for US grid computing

This new funding support will help sustain the US computing infrastructure needed to manage and distribute the masses of data streaming from CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Image courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN.

Last week, it was announced that the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation have just awarded up to $27 million (€22 million) to the Open Science Grid (OSG), which will help promote the use of distributed computing resources in the US.

This is a welcome statement for ‘big science’ projects such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The Department of Energy’s Office of Science portion of the funding, which is up to $8.2 million (€6.5 million) will directly help US national labs that make the large volumes of LHC data available to US researchers at their home institutions.

This new award will impact all of the OSG’s nine members. The laboratories that will receive funding include Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Indiana University, Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, University of Chicago, University of California San Diego, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Nebraska, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Miron Livny, a computer science researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and OSG’s principal investigator said, “The commitment from the two agencies will take the capabilities and culture we’ve developed to more campuses throughout the United States. It is about advancing the state of the art to support education and research in more science domains and improve our ability to handle more data.”

More information can be found on the Fermilab press release.