Image Courtesy Rob Quick |
Thirty-two people attended the recent Support Centers Workshop in Indianapolis, hosted
by the Indiana University-based iVDGL Operations Group with the assistance of PPDG
co-coordinator Doug Olson. The workshop goal
was to educate OSG support providers about the distributed
structure defined by the OSG.
Participants identified the following issues, which will need to be addressed to build on
existing work and provide a coherent program:
- Updates to the current software infrastructure to allow discovery of the VOs allowed to use a certain compute element.
- Finalization of the OSG risk assessment plan and implementation of the updated security incident response plan.
- Development of a support centers best practices guide.
- Development and instrumentation of a compute element resource policy.
- Diagnose current status of the current incident response procedure (email and security lists) and bring into working order as required.
- Update to the weekly operations meeting to allow support centers to submit reports.
- Complete and finalize the Grid Users Guide.
Leigh Grundhoefer, Indiana University
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The last two months have seen a steady increase in the use of OSG resources. Some sites and VOs are sending daily reports to Miron Livny, our Facility Coordinator. This is very useful for our operations, and if you are not doing this but could—please do!
The Support Centers workshop was a good occasion to discuss where we are failing to provide access to VOs at OSG sites, and to resolve to do better. Please help new applications that are ready to run—such as GROW, GLOW and nanoHUB—use available CPU cycles on your site. Site administrators: please remember to read and implement Compute Element for OSG 0.4.1. And users, please remember to read and comment on the Grid Users Guide. With regard to our partnerships, we joined EGEE in two workshops at CERN and presented at TeraGrid '06.
I look forward to seeing many of you at August's Consortium meeting.
Ruth Pordes, Fermilab
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Image Courtesy Computational Electronics Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
The BioMOCA
(Biology Monte Carlo) transport Monte Carlo tool is now running on several OSG sites
through the nanoHUB. BioMOCA is a three-dimensional coarse-grained particle ion channel
simulator based on the Boltzmann Transport Monte Carlo methodology. This computationally
intensive application was developed by scientists at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, part of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology.
Umberto Ravaioli from the University of Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering uses the output from BioMOCA simulations to investigate and understand ion
transfer in artificial membranes.
"The availability of large-scale processing resources allows me to investigate a wide
parameter space in a short time," says Ravaioli, "and lets me discover unexpected results
in how the charge layers act, which will let us construct better permeable materials."
Steve Clark and David Braun from Purdue have been working to get
nanoHUB simulations accepted by OSG sites. They have also been working with the Condor team
to get the long-running (from eight to more than 40 days) BioMOCA jobs to run successfully
through grid submissions. To date these jobs have run on sites at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of New Mexico, and up to 100 jobs have run, and
finished, on the Purdue site. This is still a work in progress, as the team works to
raise the success rate for submitted jobs and to increase the number of OSG sites.
Sebastien Goasguen, Purdue University
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The next OSG Consortium Meeting
will be held August 21-23 at the University of Washington in Seattle, followed by a Council
meeting on August 24. Visit the conference Web page
to register and view information about the venue.
The Seattle meeting will include presentations from scientists, activity leaders
and partners, as well as parallel sessions on common topics for the technical and application
groups and demonstrations.
The meeting agenda is currently being drafted, so if you have suggestions for talks,
session topics or demonstrations, please email the Program Committee.
Gordon Watts, University of Washington
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