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OSG Consortium All Hands Meeting
San Diego, California
March 5-8, 2007
Grid Workshops
March 12-14, 2007 - Santa Fe, Argentina
March 24-25, 2007 - Chicago, Illinois EGEE User Forum
Manchester, United Kingdom
May 7-11, 2007
TeraGrid '07
Madison, Wisconsin
June 4-7, 2007
View Full Calendar
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a) First meeting in Washington with six members of the program offices at DOE and NSF, the Joint Oversight Team. View information presented at the JOT.
b) Presentations and notes from the Executive Board meeting February 15th.
c)
New records in CPU usage: 157 wallclock years of CPU usage in one week (equivalent to 8200 CPUs working 24x7 for the week). These figures come from the Gratia accounting system, which is installed on many OSG sites.
d) Blueprint meeting, January 22nd-23rd covered principle/design discussion of access control to storage and issues of how to make this consistent between data access locally from jobs and through the grid; and security infrastructure -- in particular discussion about how Certificate Revocation List updates are deployed and their use checked. |
Suchandra Thapa works for the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and wears many hats, two of particular note for OSG. Suchandra is heavily involved with validation and integration test efforts for new OSG software releases. He maintains the University of Chicago validation testbed and the associated pacman software cache. This hat grows to Lincolnesque proportions during the run-up to a release.
His second area of responsibility is with the OSG troubleshooting team.
"We work on investigating and solving problems that our users
or the Operations group bring to us and which may require more extensive and long term effort than other OSG groups may have available." says Suchandra. This one's no baseball cap, either.
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Application testing has started for the OSG 0.6.0 release. Packaging of the OSG 0.6.0 software cache and documentation for provisioning of the release are occurring in parallel. We are looking for an additional ITB site to test the VDT-based SRM/dCache installation -- preferably a site with more than a single node configuration. Please contact Rob Gardner or me if you can help here. VDT 1.6.1a will be released as the basis for the OSG 0.6.0 release. There will be two weeks of final tests.
The Security Team is working within the Joint Security Policy Group on a new Site Agreement Policy. Once it is nearer completion we will distribute the policy to the Council, Support Centers and Sites for comment and input. Adoption of the policy requires agreement by the Security Team and the Executive Board followed by Council endorsement. Discussions have been taking place on tg-security@opensciencegrid.org and you are welcome to look at the mail archives and join the thread.
D0 and CHARMM have started production runs and we are paying particular attention to their success and failure rates to ensure that they get the throughput and success rates needed to get their science output.
~ Ruth Pordes |
Shewanella cells on a particle of the mineral hematite.
Image courtesy of Alice Dohnalkova, Pacific Northwest National Lab. ( Click for full image)
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In many biological disciplines, and particularly in the field of genetics, the answers to scientists' questions are buried under mountains of complex data. In genome sequencing -- ordering the billions of chemical building blocks that make up the genetic code of a cell -- a newly discovered genome is compared to vast databases of well-known and publicly available genomes.
Comparing new genomes to these huge, and still growing, databases has become a task that is larger than one computer, even a supercomputer, can handle. Grid computing has stepped up to meet the challenge, with the help of the Genome Analysis Database Update tool.
Read more |
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Last year's OSG summer workshop on South San Padre Island has spawned a collaborative effort with researchers in Argentina.
Argentina's National Agency for the Promotion of Science and Technology is funding a national project on the Promotion of Information and Communication Technologies (PROTIC).
Collaborating groups at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Cuyo are developing a PROTIC subproject on grid technologies. Graduate level schools are a component of this subproject.
At the suggestion of a colleague who participated in the South San Padre workshop, Carolina Leon Carri, a PROTIC collaborator from the University of Buenos Aires, contacted OSG's Education coordinator, Mike Wilde, to learn about OSG.
Leon Carri is involved in designing a grid portal for the Virtual Observatories galaxy catalogue in Argentina. Wilde saw that Carri's needs fit in well with a science education project led by Ben Clifford, of the University of Chicago, and together they initiated a collaborative effort. As part of this effort, OSG will participate in a Grid workshop during the next IT school, to be held March 12-14, 2007 in Santa Fe, Argentina.
Clifford will be conducting the "Hands-on Workshop in Grid Computing". He plans three days of mostly hands-on sessions targeted to the young scientists attending who know virtually nothing about the grid. The goal is to impart an understanding of high level grid computing concepts and to teach them to use the grid to advance their own fields of research. As the workshop closes, the participants will know how to achieve results on real systems.
Following the workshop, OSG would like to make OSG resources available to students from Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, initially through OSG's Education VO, and later through VOs for specific projects.
~ Anne Heavey |
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The 2007 Midwest Grid Workshop will be held at the University of Illinois at Chicago, near downtown Chicago, on Saturday-Sunday March 24-25, 2007.
This intensive 2-day workshop introduces essential skills that will be needed by researchers in the natural and applied sciences, engineering,
and computer science to conduct and support large-scale scientific
analysis in emerging grid and distributed computing environments.
Workshop participants will work with some of the world's leading experts in grid computing, through lectures and hands-on exercises. The workshop will focus on enabling the use of the national cyberinfrastructure – Open Science Grid and TeraGrid – to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing in the students' fields of research. Participants will learn to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after the workshop.
Undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and professionals in engineering, computer science, or any scientific, data- or computing-intensive disciplines may apply.
The deadline for application is March 2, 2007. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by March 9, 2007.
For more information and an application form, please visit the workshop web-site.
The workshop is co-hosted by the National Center for Data Mining and the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University.
~ Mike Wilde |
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