Travel Support Available for PEARC17 Student Contributors

PEARC17, Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2017, is now offering financial support opportunities for students with submissions to the main conference program—thanks to support from XSEDE, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and through the fundraising efforts of STEM-Trek and Virginia Tech. The deadline to apply is May 25, 2017.

Funding is available to cover costs of airfare, shared lodging, and registration fees. Due to funding constraints, participation in the PEARC17 Student Program is limited to students at U.S. and Canadian institutions, and partial support is requested from the student’s institution.

To receive travel support for the PEARC17 Student Program, students need to  APPLY HERE no later than May 25, and are required to participate in all student activities, including the volunteer program. Student authors will be notified of accepted papers by mid-April and accepted posters by mid-May.

Learn more about the PEARC17 Student Program and participation opportunities here  http://pearc17.pearc.org/student-program.

ABOUT PEARC17

PEARC17—Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2017 - unites the high-performance computing and advanced digital research communities, addressing the challenges of using and operating advanced research computing within academic and open science communities. Being held in New Orleans July 9-13, PEARC17 offers a robust technical program, as well as networking, professional growth and multiple student participation opportunities. See pearc17.pearc.org for more information.

Announcing VO Package Update

We are pleased to announce a data release for the OSG Software Stack.
Data releases do not contain any software changes.

This release contains VO Package v72:
- Added VOMS server to OSG VO: voms.grid.iu.edu
- Removed CSIU, NYSGRID, and OSGEDU VOs

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

https://www.opensciencegrid.org/bin/view/Documentation/Release3/Release33222

Need help? Let us know:

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

We welcome feedback on this release!

Be a mentor at PEARC17 and make a difference!

Make a difference in the lives of next-generation scientists and science leaders at PEARC17—Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2017 in New Orleans, July 9-13. As a mentor, you will give students the opportunity to learn from your expertise as they explore a variety of related issues, such as differing specialties, postgraduate training, and work/life balance; plus enjoy Monday’s complimentary student-mentor dinner. Many mentorships turn into lifetime friendships and have countless benefits.  

Check "I want to be a mentor" when you register for the PEARC17 conference, which will take place in New Orleans, July 9-13. The conference is open to professionals and students in advanced research computing. Registration for the conference and hotel are now open.


ABOUT PEARC17

Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2017—unites the high-performance computing and advanced digital research communities, addressing the challenges of using and operating advanced research computing within academic and open science communities. Being held in New Orleans July 9-13, PEARC17 offers a robust technical program, as well as networking, professional growth and multiple student participation opportunities. See pearc17.pearc.org for more information, and follow us PEARC on Twitter at (PEARC_17) and on Facebook (PEARChpc).

Center for Network and Storage-Enabled Collaborative Computational Science Symposium

Dear Colleagues,

Please join us May 18-19 in Ann Arbor for the first symposium of the Center for Network and Storage-Enabled Collaborative Computational Science (CNSECCS).

The symposium is intended to bring together scientists, researchers and infrastructure specialists to share experiences and best practices, and to discuss both challenges and possible solutions that enable scientists to work together on “big, distributed or diverse data”.

Speakers will come from a wide range of research domains, as well as federal funding agencies:

  * Amy Friedlander, Deputy Division Director, Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CISE/ACI), National Science Foundation.
  * Richard Carlson, Program Officer, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Department of Energy
  * Nina Silverberg, Program Director, Alzheimer's Disease Centers program, Division of Neuroscience, National Institutes of Health

We are also accepting abstracts from potential presenters through the beginning of April.

For more information and to register, visit:
http://micde.umich.edu/centers/cnseccs/2017-symposium/

For more about the center, see:
http://micde.umich.edu/centers/cnseccs/

And for any questions, please email
micde-contact@umich.edu.

We hope to see you there!

Best regards,

Shawn McKee, Director, CNSECCS

XRootD 4.6.0 removed from OSG 3.3.22

XRootD 4.6.0 was pulled from the OSG repositories. The OSG repositories still contain XRootD 4.5.0.
XRootD 4.6.0 was in the OSG repositories from Tuesday, March 11th until Friday, March 17th.

End users encountered XRootD failures when using GSI authentication.
The problems have been traced to a defect in the CRL verification code.
XRootD running in a server mode will likely experience problems,
since reading the served file usually requires authentication.
XRootD running in the manager mode may not experience any difficulties,
since the redirector typically does not do authentication.

To check if you have the affected components installed, run
`rpm -qa | grep xrootd` to display the versions of your xrootd packages.
If any of them are version 4.6.0, run `yum downgrade <package>` on those
packages.

We are awaiting the 4.6.1 XRootD release which corrects these issues.
We will test and release it next available OSG release.

We apologize for any inconvenience. Our release testing did not catch
this problem. We are augmenting our release processes to catch this
specific problem as well as similar issues that may come up in other
packages.

GOC Service Update - Tuesday, March 28th at 14:00 UTC

The GOC will upgrade the following services beginning Tuesday, March 28th at 14:00 UTC. The GOC reserves 8 hours in the unlikely event unexpected problems are encountered.

Condor Collectors
- Update HTCondor View

Data
- Update internal database servers data1 and data 2

Repo
- Rebuild production instances at RHEL6

Web Services
- Apply standard software updates

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

OSG BDII Decommissioning

OSG Collaborators,

As has been previously announced, OSG Operations and Technology are planning the retirement of the BDII information service located at is.grid.iu.edu on March 31st, 2017. As of that date, the SLA for the BDII will expire. In addition to this, on April 4th, at 9:00 US Eastern time, Operations will power off both instances of the BDII.

This is the final announcement regarding the decommissioning of this service.