|
This year marked the first time OSG has officially participated in the International Summer School on Grid Computing. The level of energy and interest of the students was truly invigorating. You found them doing practicals homework after the end of a full day. No beach. No sand. But plenty of discussion and frisbee in the evenings.
The school -- held at a converted Red Cross camp forty miles from Stockholm -- is organized and run by Professor Malcolm Atkinson and his team at the National eScience Center at the University of Edinburgh. There were about sixty students attending from many different countries..
OSG sent more than ten students and four instructors as part of our sponsored NSF International Science and Engineering activity. Students were selected based on descriptions of their science area and passing a set of technical exercises. OSG participants included two members of the IceCube physics collaboration, a CMS physicist from the University of Illinois , Chicago, a member of our Mexican OSG site, the site administrator from the bio-informatics SBGrid at Harvard and alumni from our US grid schools.
Ruth opened with an introduction to the grid; Miron lectured on the concepts and challenges of distributed computing; Alain guided students through hands-on practicals on using Condor; Ben described the OSG training activities; and Charles Bacon was part of the Globus practicals team.
The school used in-depth immersion to cover the concepts and challenges of distributed computing and hands-on experience to show the capabilities and limitations of technologies currently in place. The sustained direct contact and discussions between researchers and students was very useful for both.
Following the school, all the OSG-sponsored attendees will write reports of what they achieved and what their plans are for using and/or contributing to distributed systems. We will work with them to use the OSG and enable their involvement as continuing members of our team.
~ Ruth Pordes
|
It is Summer -- and I hope you are all enjoying it -- but for many OSG'ers, there's little rest. We have been busy preparing for the Users and Site Administrators meetings this month and local and international grid schools.
New Faces Welcomed into OSG:
Alina Bejhan started as the full-time education coordinator.
Two new faces at Caltech are Britta Daudert (work on LIGO extensions) and Liang (Charles) Huang (work on Integration activity).
Maxim Potekhin is now working on OSG extensions at BNL.
Mine Altunay is gearing up as the full-time grid security officer.
Aninal Mandal and Greg Thain are now working with the engagement crew.
Siddhartha Eluppai Srivatsan at the University of Florida will be preparting sysasmin tutorials and doing other EOT work.
There is plenty of work to keep them all busy! Please reach out to say “hello” and help them to be part of the OSG team.
OSG Site Support
We are continuing to focus on the Campaign for Users to more quickly use a wide range of sites. We know there are problems with sites:
a) installing new releases of the CA files
b) installing new versions of the VO files to support new VOs, and
c) the configuration of sites once a job lands on them.
Please submit GOC Tickets when you run into problems – this will help us improve the infrastructure and its effectiveness (Yes! That means YOU, too!)
OSG/EGEE Collaboration
Ongoing activities with EGEE are ramping up in a couple of areas: We are linking the ITB with the pre-production service so that interoperability of new releases of OSG (coming in August) and gLite will be tested before they go into production. In addition, the Operations group is ready to deploy and test the new suite of “site functional tests” which will be used to report availability of OSG sites for the World Wide LHC Computing Grid
~ Ruth
|
