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 in 2005 of Open Science Grid consisting of more than 80 sites, 50,000 CPUs and serving particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave searches, digital astronomy, genome databases, weather forecasting, molecular modeling, structural biology and nanoscience. OSG 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 tools and services in large science applications; multiple education and outreach projects; and new approaches to integrating advanced network infrastructure in scientific computing applications.
About the speaker
Paul Avery received his Ph.D in High Energy Physics from the University of Illinois in 1980 and is Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. He was a long-term member of the CLEO collaboration where he pursued research on heavy quark production and decays, developing and implementing several statistical techniques that have been widely adopted. He currently participates in the CMS experiment at CERN, Geneva, where he is developing computing infrastructure and creating software that will make possible the discovery of very heavy particles with incomplete information.
Dr. Avery is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has served on numerous national and international committees and panels, including the 2001 sub-Panel on the long-term future of high energy physics. He has been a recognized leader in a number of initiatives aimed at developing advanced grid and networking for science. He served as Director of two national NSF-funded Grid projects, GriPhyN and the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL) from 2000 – 2007 and is co-PI of three NSF-funded projects in which grid computing and advanced networking are major components: CHEPREO, UltraLight and DISUN. Avery is a co-PI and founding member of the Open Science Grid which operates a national Grid cyberinfrastructure for research communities in science and engineering.