I am very pleased to announce that we have elected Ruth Pordes as our Executive Director. Congratulations to Ruth, and thanks to Mark Green, Jerome Lauret and Doug Olson for their hard work during the election process. Ruth is already in high gear, taking responsibility for next week's OSG Consortium Meeting agenda, coordinating the OSG Letter of Intent in response to the DOE's SciDAC-2 solicitation, an almost-simultaneous submission to the NSF, and the release of OSG 0.4.

The January 5–9 election was preceded by extended discussions about management plans and election rules, and I encourage those of you who are interested to peruse OSG documents 311 and 314. There is a fair bit of work still to come, but the foundation for the transition towards a managed OSG project has been laid.

The integration test bed declared success this week, delivering a release candidate for provisioning, and the first OSG 0.4.0 sites should be up next week. The next minor release, OSG 0.4.1, is planned for March, followed by a June/July release of OSG 0.6.0. And finally, the OSG infrastructure has enjoyed record utilization in the last month. More than 2,700 simultaneously running jobs were running on January 8, a result of heavy use by ATLAS (see story below) and a significant increase in GRASE activity.

Sincerely,
Frank Wuerthwein, Chair of the OSG Interim Executive Board

SUSY signal (dots) in the connihilation region compared with various SM backgrounds (histograms). (Click on image for larger version.)

It is now possible to perform a detailed study involving large-scale CPU resources within the uniform OSG infrastructure. The large energies available at the LHC make possible several hard multijet final states. Calculations of these states involve complex matrix elements that need to be merged with shower developments, which can be performed with a Monte Carlo generator such as ALPGEN. We have recently used ALPGEN within the OSG framework to study the background processes for discovery physics such as supersymmetry (SUSY). These studies involve generation and simulation of complex Standard Model (SM) processes. In the lepton channel example shown, expected to provide a clean discovery channel in the early months of the LHC's running period, there is a clear enhancement of the SUSY signal over all SM background processes.

Earlier hadronic calibration studies in ATLAS were performed using fully simulated events from the Pythia (QCD) generator. We are now in the process of performing the hadronic calibration studies using more realistic multijet samples. OSG will be useful for many other detector performance studies that involve intense CPU and storage usage.

Sanjay Padhi, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Monitoring OSG-WLCG interoperability. (Click on image for larger version.)

The OSG-GIP adopts the design of the WLCG GIP and focuses on the following three aspects of development work:

1. Resource status: Creating dynamic plug-ins and provider scripts to capture OSG resource status and usage.
2. Automatic configuration: Configuring GIP properly without fully understanding the GLUE Schema is a daunting task. We have created a tool that automatically configures a working OSG-GIP out-of-the-box with minimal administrator intervention by leveraging the existing OSG configuration information. Currently, OSG-GIP is compliant with the GLUE Schema 1.2.
3. Validation: The OSG-GIP validation service infrequently pulls information (using LDAP search) directly from individual OSG systems to perform sanity checks on their GIP information. The systems on both the OSG ITB and the production GridCat are being validated by this service. The service has been implemented to provide a user-friendly interface.