What is the Open Science Grid?
The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific research, built and operated by a consortium of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations, and software developers. The OSG enables scientists to seamlessly harness grid-computing resources worldwide, and interoperates with multiple other grid infrastructures.
The OSG is supported by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. It is a continuation of the Grid3, NaGrid Physics Network (GriPhyN) and International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL) projects, and the Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG) project.
Based at Indiana University, the Open Science Grid Operations Center (GOC) provides a single point of operational support for the OSG. The GOC performs real time Grid monitoring and problem tracking, provides support to users, developers and systems administrators, maintains grid services, provides security incident response, and maintains information repositories.The GOC provides the OIM Registration Database for the Support Centers, Virtual Organizations, and Services. Validation and monitoring tools include BDII Information System, along with MyOSG, which provides an individualized view of GOC collected OSG data.
The OSG is also a TeraGrid Science Gateway.
For more about TeraGrid Science Gateways, see the Science Gateways page on the TeraGrid web site. For information specific to principal investigators (PIs), see the Science Gateways for PIs page. For information specific to developers, see the Science Gateways for Developers page.
For more about grid computing, see What are parallel computing, grid computing, and supercomputing?
This document was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 0503697 to the University of Chicago and subcontracted to Indiana University. Additional support was provided by IU through its participation in the TeraGrid, which is supported by the NSF under Grants No. 0833618, SCI451237, SCI535258, and SCI504075. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
Last modified on August 13, 2009.
