Dr. Paul Avery
UF

University of Florida Astronomy Colloquium - Mar. 19th, 2008

Open Science Grid: Linking Universities and Laboratories in National Cyberinfrastructure

A collaboration of physicists and computer scientists from U.S. universities and national laboratories has since 1999 conducted a multifaceted R&D program aimed at building a national grid-based "cyberinfrastructure" to serve large-scale scientific research. This collaboration led to the creation of Open Science Grid, consisting of more than 60 sites with 45,000 CPUs and serving particle physics, digital astronomy, gravitational wave searches, chemistry, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics. OSG also links campus and regional grids and is a major component of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) that handles the massive computing and storage needs of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

This collaborative work has provided a wealth of results, including powerful new Grid tools and services; a uniform grid middleware packaging scheme (the Virtual Data Toolkit) that simplifies grid deployment across many sites; integration of complex Grid tools and services in large science applications; multiple education and outreach projects; and new approaches to integrating advanced network infrastructure in scientific computing applications.