OSG Statement on Continued Services and Support

As you may have heard, the Open Science Grid (OSG) is undergoing some transitions in its funding model. We have been planning for these changes for some time, and the National Science Foundation is providing clear direction and enthusiastic support now and for the foreseeable future.

We remain committed to providing services and support for our community of resource providers and science users. To that end, we want to tell you about some short-term transitions that are planned between now and the end of May 2018.

OSG operates a fabric of services that form the core of our distributed infrastructure, and we are reviewing all service deployments.  Some services will be retired (e.g., central RSV components, VOMS Admin), most services will be migrated with little planned effect on sites (e.g., OSG Display, CVMFS, perfSONAR monitoring), and some services will be migrated with greater effect on sites (OIM and OSG CA). There will be announcements for each service as it migrates.

In addition, OSG provides support to users, Virtual Organizations (VOs), resource providers, and others through a variety of entry points. Over the next month, we will be retiring one of the three underlying support ticket-tracking systems in use today, but plan to maintain nearly all of the current methods for requesting support (e.g., email addresses).  The LHC community will concentrate its support on the existing GGUS system, and the broader community will use the existing OSG Support system based on the Freshdesk system.  As with services, there will be announcements for specific support entry points as each one migrates.

For OSG resource providers, we have created and will frequently update an OSG Operations Transition document here: https://opensciencegrid.github.io/technology/policy/service-migrations-spring-2018/

Frank Wuerthwein - OSG Executive Director
Miron Livny – OSG Technical Director and Principle Investigator
David Swanson – OSG Council Chair