The Open Science Grid Consortium is an organization that administers a worldwide grid of technological resources called the Open Science Grid, which facilitates

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

for scientific research. Founded in 2004, the

consortium A consortium () 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 achieving a ...

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 or

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of 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 instruc ...

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

particle physics Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the s ...

, research teams from disciplines like

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

chemistry Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules a ...

astronomy Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest includ ...

, and geographic information systems are currently using the grid to analyze data. Research using the grid's resources has been published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

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 accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

, 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 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

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

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. 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 (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

and

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

Peerage

The grid is peered with other grids, including TeraGrid, LHC Computing Grid, the European Grid Infrastructure, and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (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, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

information systems An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems comprise four components: task, people, structu ...

. Research about the OSG has been published in

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

and Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Funding

The consortium is funded by the Department of Energy and

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

, and has received a $30 million joint grant.

References

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