Open Science Grid
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The Open Science Grid is a national production-quality grid computing infrastructure for large scale science, built and operated by a consortium of U.S. universities and national laboratories. The OSG Consortium was formed in 2004 to enable diverse communities of scientists to access a common grid infrastructure and shared resources. Groups that choose to join the Consortium contribute effort and resources to the common infrastructure.
The OSG capabilities and schedule of development are driven by U.S. participants in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, currently being built at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The distributed computing systems in the U.S. for the LHC experiments are being built and operated as part of the OSG. Other projects in physics, astrophysics, gravitational-wave science and biology contribute to the grid and benefit from advances in grid technology. The services provided by the OSG will be further enriched as new projects and scientific communities join the Consortium.
The OSG includes an Integration and a Production Grid. New grid technologies and applications are tested on the Integration Grid, while the Production Grid provides a stable, supported environment for sustained applications. Grid operations and support for users and developers are key components of both grids. The core of the OSG software stack for both grids is the NSF Middleware Initiative distribution, which includes Condor and Globus technologies. Additional utilities are added on top of the NMI distribution, and the OSG middleware is packaged and supported through the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT).
The OSG is a continuation of Grid3, a community grid built in 2003 through a joint project of the U.S. LHC software and computing programs, the National Science Foundations’ GriPhyN and iVDGL projects, and the Department of Energy’s PPDG project.
Integration Grid
The OSG Integration Grid is a separate instance of the OSG infrastructure used for testing applications and services at scale and in a heterogeneous environment prior to their deployment on the Production Grid. The constituency of the Integration Grid is dynamic. Resources may only be there for purposes of specific tests or be dedicated to Integration use only. At least one instance of all standard OSG services is maintained in the Integration Grid for compatibility testing.
The Integration Grid is monitored by GridCat MonaLisa and the Service Registry.
The Integration Activity coordinates the Integration Grid and holds weekly phoneconferences (in addition to a very active mailing list) to review issues and plans. Participation in the Integration Grid is open to all participants in Open Science Grid (with an implied effort commitment of >.25FTE for the duration of the testing and a willingness to respond to requests from fellow participants to investigate issues and configuration options.)
New participants in OSG use their VO Support Center or the Community Support Center to learn how to use, operate or interact with the OSG infrastructure. They use the ITB for testing and integration of new applications and services on the facility.
Providers of new services on OSG write a Service Readiness Plan describing the service, how to install/configure it, integration tests to be performed on the Integration Testbed and to provide metrics for success of those tests. They then participate in the Integration Activity to make the service ready for production use.
