Executive Director Report 24th June 2008

Key Activities

• The OSG 1.0 Software Release was released in early June. Sites have started to install it. This is a major milestone for the OSG Year 2 program of work. In includes signiicant changes in the dependence on the underlying OS in terms of the openssl version, and updates in many components of the VDT. The following sites have upgraded (6/23) AGLT2, Nebraska, OCI-NSF, Purdue-Steele, UC_ATLAS_MWT2,UFlorida-IHEPA, UFlorida-PG, WISC-OSG-EDU. We have a campaign to help and encourage site administrators to do so. Administrators can fill out a form here to get help.

• Reporting LHC Tier-2 site availability and reliability through the WLCG reports. Information published by OSG to the WLCG is available here. The OSG reports are currently being collected and emailed daily. We are starting an ongoing comparison process which will be linked into the twiki page when available.
  

There is a WLCG milestone for the end of June which we hope to meet. Detailed work is progressing between OSG Operations and Measurements/metrics with the WLCG SAM and Gridview teams, and with the US ATLAS and US CMS software and computing management.

• Reporting LHC Tier-2 CPU usage. We have worked with the WLCG to correct the May reports.

• Certificate Authority acceptance and distribution: We are following our Council accepted policy for including Certificate Authority root certificates in the OSG distribution. Recent specific issues mean that we are planning to update this policy and will seek some Council guidance on the OSG projects responsibilities.

• We submitted an OSG Paper to SciDAC The draft - pre-review by the organizers - is available here

For Review/Signoff by the Council

• The Definition of Year 2 Metrics document is posted to the Document Repository. Please could this be reviewed at the July Council meeting. We are in the process of the mid-year assessment.

Meetings/Workshops:

• The users meeting at BNL was attended by about 40 people. It was a very useful forum for discussion and update on issues and plans. I request a discussion about VO Security at the August face to face Council meeting. We thank Maxim and BNL for hosting this event.

• The Joint EGEE and OSG Workshop on VO Management in Production Grids is at at HPDC on June 24, co-organized by Miron and Erwin Laure from EGEE. The agenda includes presentations by Miron, Ian, Igor, Maxim, and Tanya from OSG.

New NSF Solicitation

XD

In many areas of research, a key to making advances is the ability of scientists and engineers to manipulate extremely large quantities of information. Examples include: numerical simulation and modeling; the analysis of very large datasets, whether generated by new generations of scientific instrumentation or by numerical models; and the mining of a wide range of collections of digital artifacts. At the largest scales, the resources needed to work with huge volumes of digital information are expensive and scarce. In recent years, the research community, with support from NSF, has developed the TeraGrid? as a way of providing wide access to these scarce, expensive resources. The need for such widely shared, national resources continues to grow and as the currently funded phase of TeraGrid? operations approaches its close, NSF is inviting innovative proposals for a new infrastructure to deliver the next generation of high-end digital services, as national resources, that will provide researchers and educators with the capability to work with extremely large amounts of digitally represented information.

-- RuthPordes - 23 Jun 2008