John McGee |
John McGee, of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is the Engagement Coordinator for OSG. As such, he helps new communities ramp up their computational science to new levels, and helps recruit university campuses to implement campus grids that interconnect with OSG.
"The best part of working with OSG is the razor sharp focus on getting large scale computations completed with scientists who are unfamiliar with national cyberinfrastructure," says John. "Getting on the radar of busy scientists and educators can be a difficult task, and asking them to change how they work is often more difficult. However, with the talented staff that we have working on the engagement activity and the strong support of the entire OSG organization, we find it very rewarding. It's great to see a faculty member running two thousand jobs simultaneously for a day or two in preparation for a scientific journal submission or preliminary results for a new proposal." |
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The OSG Site Administrators Meeting covered issues regarding installing configuring and supporting OSG sites.
Image courtesy Horst Severini |
The Site Administrators Meeting this month enabled communication of a lot of useful information to help adminstrators make their sites the best ever and to make their work interesting and fun. The workshop was attended by about forty people. We hope you will read the following presentations: Configuring Resource Service Validation (RSV), How to upgrade your OSG installation and keep jobs running and the Status of OSG 0.8.0 Deployment . A list of action items from the meeting are included in the minutes, and will be followed up on in phone meetings next year.
Site Administrators, we strongly encourage you all to attend the phone and face to face meetings. The aim of these meetings is to help YOU in your work! |
The OSG home page has been redesigned to reflect various activities the consortium is involved in and to make information more readily available. |
After much planning and meetings with stakeholders and representatives from various organizations, a new home page for OSG was unveiled December 13th. Our goal was to present OSG as the dynamic organization it is, communicating that a lot of work is being done in the OSG! Most of all, we wanted to put more information at your fingertips.
This site should work for everybody -- users, resource administrators and staff members. We always welcome comments and suggestions as to how we're doing and how we can improve. Email osg-webmaster@opensciencegrid.org. |
Marcia Teckenbrock |
Oh the weather outside is frightful, (at least, in Illinois) but I hope no matter the weather, that everyone's holidays are delightful, and that you all have a happy, healthy new year.
We are looking forward to bringing you more OSG news next year and as always, we welcome your contributions. |
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Sebastien Gausguen (Clemson) & Dave Vernon (Cornell)
Image courtesy
Linda Callahan |
Sebastien Goasguen from Clemson University and Anne Heavey from Fermilab represented the OSG at the NYSGrid regional Cyberinfra
structure (CI) Day on December 4-5 in Albany . (add link to ) It was attended mostly by IT people from various New York campuses, many of which are already part of NYSGrid and use the OSG software stack.
SUNY-Buffalo reported that the NYSGrid resources will upgrade to OSG 0.8.0 in January and implement GUMS. An MoU between OSG and NYSGrid has been signed which will lay the foundation for more collaboration.
The talks are posted on the website, and are worth a visit. As always happens, many interesting discussions did not come with slides: portals for end users, urban vs. rural campuses, consortium building, integrating instrumentation in addition to grid resources, and more.
“This was our first regional CI day, and it was a good learning experience,” said Russ Hobby of Internet2, the CI Days lead. However, he thinks having a CI day hosted by and targeted to a single campus, with visitors from regional campuses, is a more productive way to go.
 Mark Shephard (RPI),
Gurcharan Khanna (RIT, NYSGrid steering committee), David Stampf, (BNL) & Michael Ridley (Nystar)
Image courtesy Linda Callahan |
Both CUNY and Columbia showed interest in hosting a CI day in the next year. Hobby is thinking of holding a Manhattan regional CI day at which all NYC-based institutions would be welcome.
“The visitors would see us actually working through the process,” he said. “This would be valuable knowledge for them to take back to their own campuses.”
Read more about CI Days at cidays.org.
~ Anne Heavey, Sebastien Goasguen, and Russ Hobby (Internet2)
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