OSG receives HPCwire's 'Top Supercomputing Achievement' awards

Multi-partner awards cite OSG's role in gravitational wave detection

The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a recipient of two HPCwire 'Top Supercomputing Achievement' awards for 2016, recognizing the use of high performance computing to verify Einstein's theory of gravitational waves.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF), OSG is a multi-disciplinary research partnership specializing in high throughput computational services.

The HPCwire awards were presented at the 2016 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC16), in Salt Lake City, Utah. OSG won in both the online publication's annual Readers' Choice and Editors' Choice categories.

The awards also recognize the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, the NSF's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the Holland Computing Center at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for their participation in verifying the existence of gravitational waves.

OSG provided access to numerous high performance computing systems for LIGO, seamlessly integrating XSEDE supercomputers like SDSC's Comet and TACC's Stampede with HPC clusters in academia and DOE national labs. LIGO used this integrated infrastructure over the course of several months to verify the statistical significance of the observed gravitational wave, thus leading to its unambiguous detection.

In the process, roughly five terabytes of LIGO data was processed many thousands of times, leading to many petabytes of exported data. The storage infrastructure at Holland Computing Center hosted the LIGO data for processing via OSG. The data was pulled as needed by the Pegasus workflow.
Frank Würthwein, who is the current executive director of the OSG, worked in tandem with XSEDE researchers to make these resources available to LIGO scientists. Würthwein is also SDSC's head of High Throughput Computing.

"There were a lot of institutions and researchers involved in this landmark discovery, as well as the actual verification process," said Würthwein, also a physicist with UC San Diego. "While high performance computing resources from all over have been used by LIGO for years, this award focused on the use of distributed high throughput computing across a wide range of HPC resources for the actual verification of this amazing discovery."

"From thought leaders to end users, the HPCwire readership reaches and engages every corner of the high performance computing community," said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. "Receiving their recognition signifies community support across the entire HPC space as well as the breadth of industries it serves. We are proud to recognize these efforts and make the voices of our readers heard, and our congratulations go out to all the winners."


A multi-partner collaboration

In February 2016, the NSF made a pivotal announcement: For the first time, scientists detected gravitational waves in the universe as hypothesized by Albert Einstein about 100 years ago. On September 14, 2015 scientists at the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves using both LIGO detectors. The waves reached Earth from the southern hemisphere, passed through the Earth, and emerged at the Earth's surface, first at the LIGO detector near Livingston, Louisiana, and then, seven milliseconds later and 1,890 miles away at the second LIGO detector in Hanford, Washington.
More details on the LIGO discovery can be found at:
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/osg-helps-ligo-scientists-confirm-einsteins-last-unproven-theory/
http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR20160225_ligo.html
https://www.xsede.org/xsede-resources-help-confirm-ligo-discovery.

The annual HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. These awards are revealed each year to kick off the annual Supercomputing Conference, which showcases high-performance computing, networking, storage, and data analysis. More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website or on Twitter through the #HPCwireAwards hashtag.


About OSG

The Open Science Grid Consortium is a community-driven organization that spans academia and Department of Energy national laboratories to advance the state of the art of distributed high throughput computing. In addition to community contributions, the OSG project receives funding from DOE and NSF to operate a fabric of services, including a production infrastructure, an integrated software stack, and a variety of intellectual support services for educators, scientists, and IT professionals.


About HPCwire

HPCwire is an online news and information resource covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. Started in 1986, HPCwire has enjoyed a legacy of world-class editorial and journalism, making it the news source of choice for science, technology, and business professionals interested in high-performance and data-intensive computing. Visit HPCwire at www.hpcwire.com.


Media Contacts:

Kyle Gross, OSG communications lead, kagross@iu.edu
Chelsea Lang, corporate marketing manager, Tabor Communications, 919 749-1895


 Related Links:

The Open Science Grid: https://www.opensciencegrid.org
National Science Foundation: https://www.nsf.gov/
Department of Energy, Office of Science: http://science.energy.gov
Pegasus: https://pegasus.isi.edu
LIGO: http://ligo.org/

Announcing OSG Software version 3.3.18

We are pleased to announce OSG Software version 3.3.18

Changes to OSG 3.3.18 include:
* GlideinWMS 3.2.16: can specify BOSCO user, start glidein manually, bug fixes
* SSLv3 is now disabled on several Globus tools
* Fix to prevent Globus GridFTP server process hangs
* Fixed edg-mkgridmap on Enterprise Linux 7
* PKI tools now generate CSRs using SHA2
* Fixed blahp qstat call to support torque-4.2.9
* Fixed crash in blahp when using glexec and limited proxies
* Augment Gratia PBS probe: process "exec_host", when "ALLPROCS" flag present
* GridFTP server script returns correct value when the service isn't running
* HTCondor-CE 2.0.11: Minor fixes

Release notes and pointers to more documentation can be found at:
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/Release3318

Need help? Let us know:
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/HelpProcedure

We welcome feedback on this release!

GOC Service Update - Tuesday, November 8th at 14:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, November 8th at 14:00 UTC. The GOC reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

Ticket
Configuration Changes tickets exchanged with BNL will be linked on the ticket view page

OIM
JIRA OIM-140: Retry CILogon host certs when we receive a "retry" error

VOMS
Remove obsolete voms for the CSIU, osg, osgcrossce and UC3 VOs

GOC Service Update - Tuesday, October 25th at 13:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, October 25th at 13:00 UTC.

The GOC reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

Ticket Exchange

* Configuration Changes

* Adding new exchange (XSEDE)

OIM

* Add “Created” timestamp field in OIM downtime table to preserve original log creation timestamp

Oasis

* Update the configuration for ligo.osgstorage.org to work better on Debian hosts.

MyOSG

* “Created” downtime timestamp to be available through reporting

All Services

* Operating system updates; reboots will be required. The usual HA mechanisms will be used, but some services will experience brief outages.

Announcing OSG CA Certificate Package Update

We are pleased to announce our first data only release for the OSG Software Stack. Data releases will not contain any software changes. A typical data release would only have CA certificate and/or VO package changes.

This release contains updated CA Certificates based on IGTF 1.78
* Removed superseded INFN-CA-2006 CA (IT)
* Updated Debian packaging to support APT security improvements
* Updated namespaces and signing_policy files for CILogon Basic CA to permit DNs without "/C=US" (US)
* Added G2 series (sha-2) QuoVadis Root 2 and Grid ICA G2 (BM)
* Removed discontinued UniandesCA (CO)

Release notes and pointers to more documentation can be found at:

https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/Release33172

Need help? Let us know:

https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/HelpProcedure

We welcome feedback on this release!

End of OSG GRAM Support - 8 November 2016

As part of the OSG transition from GRAM to HTCondor-CE technology, OSG Operations and Software teams will stop supporting GRAM CE installations on November 8, 2016. A site that requests support for GRAM or GRAM-based software will be asked to upgrade to HTCondor-CE instead. However, GRAM packages will remain available for sites that accept full responsibility for the operation of GRAM.


Other milestones that will likely occur in early 2017:

* Ending support for GRAM CEs at the OSG pilot factories, which will leave many VOs unable to run at GRAM sites

* Dropping GRAM software from the OSG software stack (starting in OSG 3.4.0)

* Removing GRAM-based code from OSG tools like osg-configure


BACKGROUND

An OSG CE is the entry point for the OSG to your local resources. At the heart of the CE is the job gateway software, which accepts incoming jobs, authorizes them, and delegates them to your batch system for execution. These days, OSG jobs come from the OSG factories and are really pilot jobs, which in turn run actual end-user jobs. Since OSG started, the Globus GRAM gatekeeper has managed grid jobs, but starting in May 2014, the OSG added another job gateway option - HTCondor-CE - that is built on core HTCondor technology. For many reasons, OSG has decided to migrate all CEs to HTCondor-CE and is today in the midst of this change.

Since August 2014, new CE installs included both HTCondor-CE and GRAM, and since December 2014, HTCondor-CE is the default job gateway software for a new site. Today, HTCondor-CE is on 60 CEs and is the sole job gateway software on many of them; the list of sites that have already migrated includes some of the largest OSG sites, as well as medium and small ones.

This is a significant technical change for OSG, but the good news is that it is well underway and has been going very smoothly for most sites. If you are still running GRAM, please consider migrating to HTCondor-CE as soon as possible (you can run both for a while, if you like). Then, once your HTCondor-CE is running well, decommission the GRAM software.

Planned Retirement of OSG BDII

OSG Collaborators,

OSG Operations and Technology are planning the retirement of the BDII

information service located at is.grid.iu.edu on March 31st, 2017. We have

been working with WLCG, ATLAS and CMS to remove dependencies or replace

the functionality within our HTCondor Collector service. This work is

still ongoing. This message is to alert you to the upcoming deprecation

date and to get feedback on any other existing dependencies that might

exist to the BDII.

If you are dependent in any way on the OSG BDII or information the OSG

BDII supplies to the WLCG or EGI BDIIs please contact us at

goc@opensciencegrid.org.