Content about Open Science Grid

Feature - OSG and TeraGrid join forces for ExTENCI

Image courtesy of Jayanta Behera.

Last week marked the kick-off for ExTENCI, the first major technical collaboration between TeraGrid and Open Science Grid.
“The idea is to have Open Science Grid and TeraGrid work together on a joint project as an experiment,” explained Paul Avery, the principle investigator for ExTENCI (which stands for Extending Science Through Enhanced National CyberInfrastructure). Although the two infrastructures have worked together to agree on principles and attend each others’ meetings, ExTENCI marks the first time that they will work together, sharing milestones and goals.
In order to make the partnership possible, the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Math and Physics Directorate each awarded ExTENCI approximately one million U.S. dollars over two years, for a grand total of just over two million U.S. dollars.
The limitations imposed by a small budget

Link of the Week - TeraGrid ’10 Proceedings

People mingle as they browse the research projects on display at the TeraGrid ’10 poster session. Image courtesy of Miriam Boon, iSGTW.

Earlier this month, researchers and computer experts gathered in Pittsburgh for TeraGrid ’10, the annual conference organized and sponsored by TeraGrid.
Not everyone could attend, of course, so it’s a good thing that the proceedings are now available online at this week’s link of the week.
The conference included a wide variety of programming, including tracks dedicated to science, technology, science gateways, and EOT (education, outreach and training). A poster session and visualization showcase featured posters and visualizations related to computational biology, molecular dynamics, computational chemistry, signal processing, computer science, computational fluid dynamics, computational multi-body dynamics, computational materials (nano-composites), grid computing

Announcement - OSG Storage Forum, 21-22 September

OSG Storage Forum will be held at the University of Chicago 21-22 September 2010.
Discussions will cover scalability, performance and tuning of the storage technologies adopted by T2 and T3 sites. We will also discuss analysis jobs storage requirements.
The storage software developers and expert storage administrators will be invited to share tips on how to improve stability and scalability of deployed storage systems. OSG storage administrators and representatives of various Virtual Organizations are encouraged to share their experiences and discuss common problems.
For more information, please visit the event’s Indico website.

Feature - New result could shed light on the existence of the Universe

The DZero collaboration has found evidence for a new effect which could explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of nature. CP violations, such as this effect, are in disagreement with the predictions of the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of particles and their interactions. The effect ultimately may help to explain why the universe is filled with matter while antimatter disappeared shortly after the Big Bang. Image courtesy of the DZero collaboration. 

The Big Bang should have created a universe with equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. Instead, we only see antiparticles when they are produced in nuclear reactions, cosmic rays, and particle colliders.
The dominance of matter that we observe in the universe is possible only if there is ‘CP violation’ – differences in the behavior of particles and antiparticles. Although physicists first observed certain forms of CP vio

Research Report - Turning the microscope inwards: Studying scientific software ecosystems As an example, this slide displays the logos of all of the software in the Eclipse software ecosystem. Image courtesy of James Howison and James Herbsleb. Almost every workflow that generates scientific results today involves software: from configuration and control of instruments, to statistical analysis, simulation and visualization. This means that creating and maintaining software is a significant activity in scientific laboratories, including science and engineering virtual organizations. Our research group at Carnegie Mellon University is examining scientific software as an ecosystem, seeking to understand the circumstances in which software is created and shared. The goal of this Open Science Grid project is to identify effective practices and provide input to science funding policy. Towards this end, the OSG/CMU Scientific Software Ecosystem Workshop was held 16-17 February 2010 in Los

Video of the week - Monitoring with the fishes

If the fish in this week’s video of the week look familiar, it’s because iSGTW readers have seen them before, in the article entitled “Fish business.”
But unlike earlier editions of the program, in which each fish represented a node in a cluster, this version monitors the whole of Open Science Grid.
“They used Ganglia in order to get information about the cluster – the bigger the fish the more work that node was doing, and if it was dead or it was not reporting it would float to the top like a dead fish,” explained Derek Weitzel, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska, who is responsible for the last few editions of this open source program.
In the current version, if a fish is flashing, it means that the cluster that particular fish represents is overloaded, with 20 percent or more of total jobs waiting in queue. To find out more about that clusterÂ’s status, just click on its fish.
Upgrading the program to interact wi

Video of the week - RHIC’s hot quark soup

Earlier this month, two separate groups of scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider announced new results.
For the first result, scientists rolled back the clock to measure the temperature in the first instants of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma “soup.” They found that at that instant, the temperature is a whopping four trillion degrees. To put things in perspective, the temperature at the sun’s core is a mere 15 million degrees Kelvin, while the temperature at the core of a collapsed Type II supernova is only 100 billion degrees.
The second group of scientists discovered that, in the magnetic field induced by the accelerator’s colliding charged particles and the vortices that form in the resulting quark-gluon soup, positively charged quarks tend to move in one direction, and negatively charged quarks in the other. That makes it an example of asymmetry, an asymmetry that could give physicists clues as to

Bringing LHC data to US Tier-3s

Computer racks at the Fermilab Grid Computer Center. Image courtesy of Fermilab.

It’s a challenge for smaller research groups to get set up on a grid, but that’s exactly what physicists at over 40 sites across the United States need to do to get access to data from the Large Hadron Collider.
The new US Tier-3 centers – evenly split between the ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid experiments – have each received about $30,000 in funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Physicists scattered around the country will be able to use them to do their own analysis of data generated by two of the LHC experiments.
To get these sites online, a great deal of expertise will be needed. And that’s where the US LHC Tier-3 support group comes into the picture.
“What we are trying to do is to help them get their systems set up and connected to the grid, to make it easier for them to get access to data and addi

Feature - Here to help: embedded cyberinfrastructure experts

It isn’t easy designing software that can run on a cluster like Fermilab's Grid Computing Center. That’s why advanced technical support is so essential. Photo by Reidar Hahn, Fermilab Visual Media Services.

Although much of today’s scientific research relies on advanced computing, for many researchers learning how to adapt and optimize applications to run on supercomputers, grids, clouds, or clusters can be daunting.
To help newcomers, many cyberinfrastructure providers offer in-depth support tailored to fit each user’s needs. This is much more than the typical technical support that helps users write scripts to enable their jobs to run. Instead, cyberinfrastructure experts are embedded directly into a user team to provide longer-term assistance.
One example is TeraGrid User Support and Services, led by director Sergiu Sanielevici.
“The designation of a supercomputer is that it’s basicall

Newsflash - Fall conference line-up

At the EGEE conference in Barcelona, attendees can take sessions on ‘Grids, new media and video’ and ‘From abstract to international news story.’ Image courtesy stock.xchng

The fall conference season will take iSGTW readers to the shores of the Mediterranean in Barcelona, the heights of the Canadian Rocky Mountains in Banff, and the banks of the Columbia River in Portland. Read on to find out more about some of the booths and workshops you’ll find at each conference!
Enabling Grids for E-sciencE ’0921-25 September, Barcelona, Spain
Next week (21-25 September), the bulk of the European grid community will gather in Barcelona for the final conference of Europe’s flagship computing grid project, EGEE.
“With the transition from EGEE to the new European Grid Initiative at the forefront of everyone's minds, this final EGEE conference will be the perfect time for members of the grid community to promote their wo

Feature – Grid helps to filter LIGO’s data

Workers at LIGO adjust the optic suspensions in situ. The suspension system is one of the physical measures LIGO takes to isolate the detector from false signals such as seismic activity. Courtesy of LIGO Lab.

Tiny ripples in the fabric of space-time may provide scientists with a way to study cosmic processes that are invisible to optical telescopes, such as the collision of two black holes.
In his theory of general relativity, Einstein predicted that such ripples, called gravitational waves, would be created when a mass accelerates. However, gravitational waves are so small – about one thousand times smaller than a proton – that even the relatively large ones generated by massive astrophysical events are very difficult to detect.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), which has sites in Washington and Louisiana, uses lasers to search for these minute cosmic ripples that carry information abou

Feature - Identifying network bottlenecks Internet2 and the Open Science Grid have formed a partnership to deploy advanced network monitoring and diagnostic tools on the grid. Image courtesy of invoice-factoring.com.au. Network performance problems bedevil scientists and network operators alike.  Troubleshooting requires a multi-pronged approach, and problem resolution often drags – holding back scientific progress. To address this in the grid community, Internet2, the leading U.S. networking consortium in the research and education community, has formed a partnership with the Open Science Grid to deploy a set of advanced network monitoring and diagnostic tools on the grid.Network users and operators solve problems most quickly when given transparent access to the entire network path involved. Typically, however, separate organizations operate different segments along a full network path and each so-called “domain” controls access to its own diagnostic and p