Research Communities served by Engagement

Current initiatives

We are currently working with fifteen users at various stages within the engagement process. These include researchers in fields ranging from genetics to library science to earthquake simulation to video processing to physics (and beyond). We are actively recruiting new users via structured programs such as CI Days, and continually through informal social networking by the engagement staff and the entire OSG organization.

Challenges and Successes

One of the biggest challenges to user engagement is getting the initial contact with potential users, catching them at the right time within their cycle to ignite an engagement, and developing the trust and relationships necessary to drive lasting changes in their working methodologies.

Successful user engagements include:

• Production running using more than twenty thousand CPU hours of the CHARMM molecular dynamic simulation to the problem of water penetration in staphylococcal nuclease using opportunistically available resources across more than ten OSG sites; see Grids work like a CHARMM for molecular dynamics
• Improvement of the performance of the nanoWire application from the nanoHub project on sites on the OSG and TeraGrid, such that stable running of batches of five hundred jobs across more than five sites is routine; see Keeping up with Moore's Law
• Adaptation and production running opportunistically using more than a hundred thousand CPU hours of the Rosetta application from the Kuhlman Laboratory in North Carolina across more than thirteen OSG sites; see Designing proteins from scratch
• Production runs of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) application using more than one hundred and fifty thousand CPUhours on the NERSC OSG site at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)

• osg-eb-DEC-2006.ppt: Slides for Engagement report at Dec-2006 executive board meeting

-- AnneHeavey - 23 Jan 2008