OASIS announcement

The OSG will be performing a migration of the OASIS services to be physically located at the University of Nebraska.  The hosts behind oasis.opensciencegrid.org, oasis-login.opensciencegrid.org, and oasis-replica.opensciencegrid.org will migrate Thursday, 3 May 2018, starting at 10AM EST.

The migration will require us to  to synchronize the home directories and OASIS contents from the old server to the new; we expect this to complete within three hours. During that period, access to oasis-login.opensciencegrid.org will be disabled.

Test versions of the new hosts are already available at oasis-itb.opensciencegrid.org, oasis-login-itb.opensciencegrid.org, and oasis-replica-itb.opensciencegrid.org. Concerned users are encouraged to test their publication workflow on those services.  The ITB hosts were last synchronized on 25 April and any changes done on the ITB there will be reset on 3 May.

If you see any issues or have any questions or concerns, please reach out to https://support.opensciencegrid.org/ or help@opensciencegrid.org.

OSG Operations and OSG Software Team
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/

DNS Migration Tuesday, 23 April, 10:00 EDT

The OSG will be performing a migration of the nameserver for opensciencegrid.org and osgstorage.org next Tuesday, 23 April 2018, starting at 10AM EST.  Given the level of caching within the DNS infrastructure, it may take up to 24 hours for the change to fully propagate.

The migration is expected to be completely transparent to all sites and not require any action.

However, there remains some risk of interruption, particularly around the delivery of email messages to opensciencegrid.org lists.  If you see any issues next Tuesday, kindly reach out to https://support.opensciencegrid.org or, for non-email-related issues, help@opensciencegrid.org.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out prior to the transition.

OSG Operations and OSG Software Team
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/

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

Announcing OSG Software version 3.4.10

We are pleased to announce OSG Software version 3.4.10.

NOTE: See the release notes for known issues with Singularity 2.4.6

Changes to OSG 3.4.10 include:
- Singularity 2.4.6: fixed bind mount security vulnerability
- HTCondor-CE 3.1.1: now accepts InCommon certificates
- HTCondor 8.6.10: fixed handling of grid jobs when submit fails
- cigetcert 1.16: first release in the OSG Software Stack
- BLAHP: Improved input file checks and can save submit info for debugging
- xrootd-lcmaps: fixed crashes on EL6 with HTTPS requests
- frontier-squid: fixed startup problem under SELinux
- osg-configure: several minor bug fixes
- Upcoming: HTCondor 8.7.7
- Upcoming: xrootd-hdfs improved write support

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

http://opensciencegrid.github.io/docs/release/3.4/release-3-4-10/

Need help? Let us know:

http://opensciencegrid.github.io/docs/common/help/

We welcome feedback on this release!

Applications and letters of recommendation are due Friday, April 20!

Announcing the Open Science Grid User School 2018

If you could access hundreds or even thousands of computers for your
scholarly work, what could you do? How could it transform your work?
What discoveries might you make?

We are seeking applicants for the Open Science Grid (OSG) User School
2018, which takes place July 9-13 at the beautiful University of
Wisconsin in Madison. Participants will learn to use high throughput
computing (HTC) to harness vast amounts of computing power for research,
applicable to nearly any field of study (e.g., physics, chemistry,
engineering, life sciences, earth sciences, agricultural and animal
sciences, economics, social sciences, medicine, and more).

For more background:
https://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/htc.html
https://www.opensciencegrid.org/news/research-highlights-list/
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KeI-ZGfPya6S9WQ7Wzo7lRhU5fr0N_gIHRgRtK3tlIc/

Using lectures, discussions, roleplays, and lots of hands-on work with
OSG experts in HTC, participants will learn how HTC systems work, how to
run and manage many jobs and huge datasets, how to implement a realistic
scientific computing workflow, and where to turn for help and more info.

Worried about costs? We pay all basic travel, hotel, and food costs for
applicants who are selected to attend. This is a valuable offer!

Ideal candidates are graduate students whose research involves or could
involve large-scale computing - work that cannot be done on one laptop
or a handful of computers. Also, we accept some post-doctoral students,
faculty, staff, and advanced undergraduates, so make a strong case for
yourself regardless of your current role!

IMPORTANT DATES

Application Period (OPEN NOW): 15 March - 20 April 2018
OSG User School: 9-13 July 2018

MORE INFORMATION AND APPLICATIONS

Web: https://www.opensciencegrid.org/UserSchool
Email: user-school@opensciencegrid.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OSGUserSchool
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OSGUserSchool

Please forward this announcement to anyone who might benefit from the
OSG User School. And consider posting our flyer where appropriate:

https://opensciencegrid.github.io/user-school-2018/files/osg-user-school-2018-flyer.pdf

Operations Service Update - Thursday, April 12th, 2018 at 13:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Thursday, April 12th, 2018 at 13:00 UTC. Grid Operations reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

Repo
  * Remove el5 and osg 3.1 support

OIM
  * Downtime add/editing permission integration update
  * SSO update

Operations Service Update - Tuesday, March 27th, 2018 at 13:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, March 27th, 2018 at 13:00 UTC. Grid Operations reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

REPO
 *Update repository maintenance scripts

Oasis
 *Update to cvmfs-servermon-1.7+

OIM
 *Python script updates
 *Database configuration changes

Myosg
 *Jquery update

Ticket Exchange
 *Fermilab format update