The Open Science Grid Consortium is an organization that administers a worldwide

grid Grid, The Grid, or GRID may refer to: Common usage * Cattle grid or stock grid, a type of obstacle is used to prevent livestock from crossing the road * Grid reference, used to define a location on a map Arts, entertainment, and media * News g ...

of technological resources called the Open Science Grid, which facilitates

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

for scientific research. Founded in 2004, the

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...

is composed of service and resource providers, researchers from universities and national laboratories, as well as computing centers across the United States. Members independently own and manage the resources which make up the distributed facility, and consortium agreements provide the framework for technological and organizational integration.

Use

The OSG is used by scientists and researchers for data analysis tasks which are too computationally intensive for a single

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

. While most of the grid's resources are used for

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...

, research teams from disciplines like

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

, and

geographic information systems A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a br ...

are currently using the grid to analyze data. Research using the grid's resources has been published in the

Journal of Physical Chemistry ''The Journal of Physical Chemistry A'' is a scientific journal which reports research on the chemistry of molecules - including their dynamics, spectroscopy, kinetics, structure, bonding, and quantum chemistry. It is published weekly by the Amer ...

Large Hadron Collider

The Open Science Grid was created in order to facilitate data analysis from the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

, and about 70% of its 300,000 computing-hours per day are dedicated to the analysis of data from particle colliders. Once data has been collected and distributed by the

LHC Computing Grid The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), formerly (until 2006) the LHC Computing Grid (LCG), is an international collaborative project that consists of a grid-based computer network infrastructure incorporating over 170 computing centers in 42 co ...

, the Open Science Grid assists physicists from institutions around the world in analysis. The grid has been designed so that resources and data are shared automatically:

Architecture

In total, the OSG comprises over 25,000 computers with over 43,000 processors, most of which are running a distribution of

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. 72 institutions, including 42 universities, are consortium members who contribute resources to the grid. There are 90 distinct computational and storage nodes in the grid, which are distributed across the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

and

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

Peerage

The grid is peered with other grids, including

TeraGrid TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, an ...

, the

European Grid Infrastructure European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) is a series of efforts to provide access to high-throughput computing resources across Europe using grid computing techniques. The EGI links centres in different European countries to support international rese ...

, and the

Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, an ...

(XSEDE), allowing data and resources from those grids to be shared.

Study

The grid's architecture has been studied by many researchers in the fields of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and

information systems An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, information storage, store, and information distribution, distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems a ...

. Research about the OSG has been published in

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

and

Lecture Notes in Computer Science ''Lecture Notes in Computer Science'' is a series of computer science books published by Springer Science+Business Media since 1973. Overview The series contains proceedings, post-proceedings, monographs, and Festschrifts. In addition, tutorials, ...

Funding

The consortium is funded by the

Department of Energy A Ministry of Energy or Department of Energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-rel ...

and

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

, and has received a $30 million joint grant.

References

{{reflist Cyberinfrastructure Grid computing projects Technology consortia Large Hadron Collider