What is the OSG?

Last week I attended the Open Science Grid (OSG) All Hands meeting in Boston. For those who aren’t familiar with the organization the OSG is amazing cooperative computing effort between dozens of universities and research facilities.

The basic premise of the OSG is that many research organizations have computing resources that are not always fully utilized. Members of the OSG may take advantage of idle computing cycles belonging to other members to run programs opportunistically.

The OSG is being leveraged heavily for high energy physics data analysis especially by the Atlas and CMS experiments which are both part of the LHC. Additionally D0, CDF, and a host of other US experiments use the OSG to augment their own large computing clusters.

To learn more about the OSG check the website: http://opensciencegrid.org