All Hands OSG Consortium Meeting
Renaissance Computing Institute, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
March 3-7, 2008

In parallel to continuing the work towards the release we will be starting the communication and planning with the sites on their upgrade plans.

We are also naturally starting to collate the requirements for OSG 1.0!

~ Rob Gardner, Rob Quick & Alain Roy

If you've ever flirted with the idea of contributing to International Science Grid This Week , now would be a great time. In the last four months iSGTW readership has more than doubled, indicated increased interest in grid computing projects and a great chance to increase your project's visibility.

iSGTW is a collaboration between the Open Science Grid and Enabling Grids for E-sciencE projects and promotes the success of grid computing as a tool for scientists and researchers.

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Joining the dots: creating interoperable grids, Anne Heavey. Published in the August 29, 2007 issue of iSGTW

ATLAS: the data chain works, Christy Burne. Published in the September 19, 2007 issue of iSGTW

Report:  The Open Science Grid - Its First Year

Council Meeting Report

•  A new Site Security Policy, which will be integrated into the resource registration process in the near future was adopted.

•  Concurrence was made on plans for the next OSG All Hands meeting, which will be March 3 2008 at RENCI

•  Based on their contributions to the D0 reprocessing effort last Spring and outreach to South America , the proposal to include DOSAR on the Council was approved. Dick Greenwood of LSU is the new Council member representing DOSAR.

•  Members of the Council volunteered to form a sub-committee to help the OSG project define and assess metrics with the goal of understanding the progress of the scale and value offered by our infrastructure and collaboration. Testing on ITB will include at least ten sites.

•  The User Satisfaction Survey was reviewed, and the Council thanked the User Group coordinators for this useful piece of work.

•  The Education team presented their ideas for working on a self-paced online course, which should be ready by the end of November.

•  We discussed progress and feedback for the iSGTW newsletter with editor Cristy Burne. Her goal is to encourage debate and to bring some different voices to the publication.

•  We revisited the issues of site environment inconsistencies and how we can make better use of the diverse resources on OSG in a coherent way. The new Site Coordination activity, led by Rob Gardner, was regarded as a good step to make improvements in this area.

•  The Council endorsed the proposal to add two organizations to the OSG project staff for the coming year: The Clemson University team, led by Sebastien Goasguen,who will be helping John McGee in the Engagement activity in the area of Campus Grids; and University of Nebraska , who will be contributing to the validation and analysis of monitoring and metrics.

September marks the end of the first year of the OSG Project. Since joining the OSG in the beginning of 2007, I have been working closely with the Resources Managers, Paul Avery and Kent Blackburn, the Executive Director, Ruth Pordes , and the rest of the Executive Board on the organization, processes, and infrastructure needed to plan and run a multi-institutional project like the OSG.

This involves working on things such as statements of work, budgets, WBS updates, and quarterly reports.  While approaching the end of the project year, we entered a very busy time. We worked to keep focus on execution of the work plan for the first year, and at the same time started planning for the second year. Since May, we have defined the high level goals and then refined these into a program of work for the OSG project for Year 2. This covers the specific work to be done at each institution, alignment of resources and budget and the WBS.

I am currently working with the OSG team across seventeen institutions on finalizing who will be doing what in the coming year. Our focus areas for the Facility in the second year, as defined by the Executive Board, will be on operations stability, improving the ability of users to determine status and source of failures to increase usability, accounting and its presentation, progress on data movement/management and strengthening the customer support function.

As we enter the second year of OSG, I am using the feedback from our stakeholders to improve our processes and infrastructure so the project and budget coordination work is handled more efficiently. My work is only possible through the active participation and support of so many OSG staff members. Thus, I am always looking for their feedback on how to better address the various project and budget management tasks that help us manage the OSG work program.

~Chander Sehgal

Over the past few months, the reported usage of the OSG has steadily increased to more than 10k CPU days per day. Our main high energy physics stakeholders are continuously running across multiple non-HEP sites, though the amount of opportunistic usage is still not fully understood. You may have seen the recent iSGTW articles about the use of OSG resources by the Rosetta and Nanowire applications. Both are examples of accomplishments by the OSG engagement effort over the past year.

We have been busily working to understand where we have fallen down in delivering for users' needs and also for planning for the work for the OSG second year. It seems just like yesterday when we wrote the plan for the first year!

Happily, many talks at the Computing in High Energy Physics conference in early September referred to benefits from or contributions to the OSG. There was also a lot of discussion regarding the final stages of planning for the start of LHC data taking next year and deployment of the software which will need to be in place. In particular, talk centered around the deployment and use of grid-accessible managed storage – one of our OSG focus areas for the coming year.

The Resource Service Validation (RSV), one of the new OSG functionalities available in OSG 0.8.0,  – was well-received in Joint Monitoring Group discussions at the WLCG collaboration meeting. We're looking forward to using the results of these discussions to provide more stable service to a site locally and for the Operations Support team to have access to more accurate information about the current state of the resources. Site and VO administrators are encouraged to read about the RSV.


In the middle of September, we had the first joint EGEE gLITE design – OSG blueprint meeting. We consolidated our plans for validation of interoperation between the two infrastructures before each release of the individual software stacks. The technical work is part of the OSG Integration Activity and is being led by Burt Holzman on the OSG side and Nick Thackery of the EGEE.

Miron visited China, where he had several useful discussions with projects and organizations there. He gave a talk at the Chinese American Networking Symposium tastefully entitled “Marinating and Deploying Dependable Middleware - The Open Science Grid Experience.”

We are looking forward to following up on his visit for several areas of work.

Last, but not least, if you have colleagues you would like us to meet and reach out to as part of the OSG collaboration, please do contact us!

~ Ruth Pordes