Every day researchers add another sea of data to an ocean of knowledge
on the world around us—billions on top of billions of measurements, images, and
observations of the tiniest subatomic particles up to the movement of planets
and stars.

“Making sense of that—simulating, mapping, analyzing—this is how
researchers work these days,” said Miron Livny, computer sciences professor at
the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “More and more researchers need more and
more computing power to support that work.”

To that end, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and
the National Science Foundation have committed up to $27 million to Open
Science Grid (OSG), a nine-member partnership extending the reach of
distributed high-throughput computing (DHTC) capabilities.

Distributed computing musters the power of a network of machines
that reside at different institutions to make the best use of all available
processing and storage capacity, giving scientists the muscle of a
supercomputer that may otherwise be out of reach.

Expanded over the last six years to include more than 80 sites
contributing users and data storage and processing capacity, OSG now delivers
more than 2 million computing hours and moves about a third of a petabyte of
data on a daily basis.

“The commitment from the two agencies will take the capabilities
and culture we’ve developed to more campuses throughout the United States,”
said Livny, OSG’s principal investigator. “It is about advancing the state of
the art to support education and research in more science domains and improve
our ability to handle more data.”

The OSG Consortium bridges organizational boundaries, working
directly with faculty, students, and system administrators at campuses across
the nation, as well as large multinational scientific collaborations such as
the Large Hadron Collider at the European
Center for Nuclear
Research.

“Our close partnerships allow us to build on existing experience
in working with and processing Big Data and the advanced networks needed to
transport the massive datasets of the future,” said Michael Ernst, an OSG
co-principal investigator who directs the Brookhaven National Laboratory
RHIC/ATLAS Computing Facility and coordinates computing activities across the
United States for ATLAS, one of the LHC’s largest particle physics experiments.

“Moving forward, the OSG will continue to bring these principles
and technologies to the benefit of new research communities, and also expand
its services, integrating networks, data, and ever more complex user
workflows,” said Lothar Bauerdick, OSG executive director and head of the U.S.
LHC Compact Muon Solenoid experiment software and computing project.

OSG, a full partner in the NSF Extreme Digital program and a
member of the XSEDE federation, will field new tools for distributed computing
to facilitate sharing of computational resources both on and between campuses.

“The OSG has been developing the Virtual Data Toolkit for over
10 years,” said Frank Würthwein, an OSG co-principal investigator and physics
professor at the University
of California–San Diego. “This software service acts as an anchor for the DHTC community, supporting
components that researchers need but are no longer supported elsewhere. Over
the next five years, the OSG software services will expand into new, more
community-specific, integrated software solutions via the VDT.”

The DOE Office of Science portion of the funding—up to $8.2
million—will support distributed computing efforts based at DOE national
laboratories that make masses of data from experiments at the LHC available to
U.S. researchers at their home institutions. The balance of the funding,
contributed by NSF, will be used to promote distributed computing resources at U.S.
universities.

Under the new award, nine institutions will receive funding:
Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, University of Chicago,
University of Wisconsin Madison, Indiana University, University
of California San Diego, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, University of Nebraska, and the Information Sciences Institute at
the University of
Southern California.

“The members of the OSG Consortium are fully committed to
collaborating over the next five years to make this project a success,” said
Ruth Pordes, chair of the OSG Council and the Fermilab Computing Sector
associate head for Grids. “By working together, the OSG project and the
scientists who use the OSG will be able to achieve great things.”

Source: Brookhaven National Laboratory