OSG Newsletter, May 2010

Usability--a Security Team Focus

There is no question that certificates are hard to deal with. Even computer professionals have a hard time with them. The OSG Security team has been listening to users' difficulties for a while, organized a workshop at University of Wisconsin-Madison last November and a subsequent workshop at the All Hands meeting last March. The initial process for obtaining a certificate is one of the major hurdles that discourages new users from using certificates, and therefore, the OSG . In order to ease the process, the team decided to take short- and long-term approaches. As a short-term solution, OSG is working on designing an OSG -specific certificate registration web page for Mac, Windows and Linux users with a simplified user interface. For the longer term, the team wants to find ways to automate users' end-to-end certificate management. Among the options to do this is enhancing the command line security management software that manages the entire certificate life cycle and works transparently to the end user. The team is collaborating with SBgrid users to measure the feasibility of this and other ideas. It is encouraging that SBGrid trimmed off three arduous steps from its once eight-step registration process.

The Security Team wants to help. We can call or visit you as needed. Don't hesitate to contact us at osg security.

~Mine Altunay

OSG Summer School

OSG is hosting a new summer school on High Throughput Computing in Madison, Wisconsin July 19-22, 2010.

Students will learn to use high-throughput computing ( HTC ) systems, at their own campuses or using the OSG , to run large-scale computing applications that are at the heart of today's cutting-edge science. Through lectures, discussions, and lots of hands-on activities with experienced OSG staff, they will learn how HTC systems (including Condor) work , how to run and manage lots of jobs and huge datasets to implement a scientific computing workflow, and where to turn for more information and help.

The school is ideal for graduate students in computer science or other sciences where large-scale computing is a vital part of the research process, but any qualified and interested applicant will be considered. We are accepting applications now for students. Successful applicants will have all travel and school expenses paid for by the OSG . Furthermore, as part of a collaboration with TeraGrid, students will go to the annual TeraGrid Conference (TG'10, August 2-5 in Pittsburgh, PA) with all travel and conference expenses paid. This is a great opportunity!

Please view for more information and applications .

~ Alain Roy

CI Days at Notre Dame

The Engagement team presented an OSG tutorial at Notre Dame's CI Days event, providing a forum for discussion and learning about OSG services and capabilities on the national scale and how they interact with the existing local campus CI at Notre Dame. The attendees represented mathematics, physics, anthropology, and campus research computing. In-Saeng Suh of Notre Dame gave a brief overview of the Fighting Irish resources that participate in OSG and the Northwest Indiana Computational Grid (NWICG ). Notre Dame has contributed resources to a number of VOs with the NWICG NotreDame site and actively participates via the CMS project. CI Days events provide an important venue for discussions between campus researchers and local and national CI providers to help plan for services and capabilities needed to advance research and education. We in OSG look forward to continuing dialog and collaboration with Notre Dame.

~ John McGee

Production Report from CMS

The CMS experiment continues to take data at 7 GeV, as the LHC continues to increase luminosity--We currently have about 10 inverse nanobarns on tape, and we seem to be doubling our dataset every week. In the meantime we are running re-reconstruction on our 8 defined primary datasets at the Tier 1 facilities, and continue to analyze data at the Tier 2s and Tier 3s.

~ Burt Holzman

Notes From the Executive Director

A different science dominates the non-physics use this past week or so. Derrick Stolee, a graduate student in mathematics at UNL is attempting to find or prove the
(non-existence of) strongly regular graphs (SRGs) and directed strongly regular graphs (DSRGs) using discrete optimization techniques. The justification for the exploration is that many important problems in modern mathematics involve the understanding of graphs, and many tools and techniques have been developed to analyze them.

The current goal is to combine modern proof techniques with computational methods to solve unanswered questions related to complex graphs including the existence of certain strongly-regular graphs [SRGs], space-bounded algorithms for reachability, and variants of the Reconstruction Conjecture. Derrick has already found a set of previously unknown DSRG parameters with no solution and another set of DSRG parameters with many solutions.

Another non-physics activity was the recent organization of an European Molecular Biology Practical Course on Scientific Programming and Data Visualization for Structural Biology where Piotr Sliz (SBGrid, Harvard Medical School) and John McGee presented, garnering interest in both EGEE and OSG activities.

We had a Blueprint meeting at BNL to discuss Configuration Management or "How to make things more usable for software installers." Some good interesting ideas for the VDT Team to explore came out of the discussions as well as some blueprint additions that should bolster the energy of the Documentation teams:

• Documentation is quallified by the target audience.
• Documentation for relevant target audiences is an essential part of any OSG service and implemenation.
• Documentation should be reviewed as appropriate for training and education.

~ Ruth Pordes

April ATLAS & CMS Thumbnails

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