UC San Diego Researchers Get Access to Open Science Grid

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The University of California, San Diego, and the Open Science Grid (OSG), a multi-disciplinary consortium funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (NSF), have announced a partnership under which campus researchers will have access to the OSG’s fabric of Distributed High-Throughput Computing capabilities.

The collaboration will benefit researchers with high-throughput workloads commonly used in domains such as biomedical and life sciences, as well as the geosciences.

“As one of the nation’s leading research universities, UC San Diego has deep expertise in a wide range of science areas, and this collaboration will expand the availability of shared computing resources among researchers involved in areas such as climate science, protein structure research, and marine metagenomics, as well as projects such as the Institute for Genomic Medicine and the recently announced Brain Mapping Initiative,” said Sandra A. Brown, UC San Diego’s Vice Chancellor for Research.

Under the agreement, Michael Norman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, has been named to the OSG Council to represent the university and its affiliated organizations.

“I am excited to join the OSG Council,” said Norman. “UC San Diego has an extensive history of working with OSG through the efforts of Frank Würthwein, who directs the LHC Tier 2 data center at the university, and was the first chair of the OSG Council. This partnership builds on that foundation and will provide UC San Diego researchers access to additional computational resources to those already on campus.”

The partnership also means that members of the OSG will gain access to two key high-compute systems at SDSC: Trestles and Gordon. Members of the OSG community will be able to apply for allocation of unused computing cycles on these systems, including use of 4-gigabyte cores, which means faster computing of more data-intensive applications.

“We expect UC San Diego to play a key role in advancing the adoption of high-throughput computing technologies on our campuses,” said Miron Livny, PI and Technical Director of the OSG. “Building on the long and strong ties with Frank Würthwein and his group, we are looking forward to working together with UC San Diego researchers to advance the sharing of computing resources within and across our campuses.”

The partnership also means that UC San Diego will be one of only a few research universities in the U.S. that is served by both OSG and the NSF’s XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program, a nationwide partnership comprising 16 supercomputers as well as high-end visualization and data-analysis resources.

“This means better interoperability between the OSG and XSEDE at our site,” said SDSC’s Norman, noting that by the end of this summer, researchers will be able to access Gordon or Trestles under an OSG portal in addition to the XSEDE interface.