Multi-Disciplinary Sciences

3.Development of the OSG Distributed Infrastructure

3.1Usage of the OSG Facility

The stakeholders continue to ramp up their use of OSG, and ATLAS and CMS VOs are ready for LHC data taking that is beginning. They have each run several workload tests (including STEP09) and the OSG infrastructure has performed well in these exercises and is ready to support full data taking.

In the last year, the usage of OSG resources by VOs has continued to increase from 3,500,000 hours per week to over 5,000,000 hours per week, sustained; additional detail is provided in attachment 1 entitled “Production on the OSG.” OSG provides an infrastructure that supports a broad scope of scientific research activities, including the major physics collaborations, nanoscience, biological sciences, applied mathematics, engineering, and computer science. Most of the current usage continues to be in the area of physics but non-physics use of OSG is a growth area with current usage exceeding 200,000 hours per week (averaged over the last year) spread over 13 VOs.

With about 80 sites, the production provided on OSG resources continues to grow; the usage varies depending on the needs of the stakeholders. During stable normal operations, OSG provides approximately 700,000 CPU wall clock hours a day with peaks occasionally exceeding 900,000 CPU wall clock hours a day; approximately 150,000 opportunistic wall clock hours are available on a daily basis for resource sharing.

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  Onsite help and hands-on assistance to the Atlas and CMS Tier-3 coordinators in setting up their Tier-3 test sites including several multi-day meetings to bring together the OSG experts needed to answer and document specific issues relevant to the Tier-3s. OSG hosts regular meetings with these coordinators as well to discuss issues and plan steps forward.
  
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  OSG packaging and support for Tier-3 components such as XRootd that are projected to be installed at over half of the Tier-3 sites (primarily Atlas sites). This includes testing and working closely with the Xrootd development team via bi-weekly meetings.
  
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  Refactoring OSG workshops to draw in the smaller sites by incorporating tutorials and detailed instruction. The Site-admin Workshop in Indianapolis this year for example presented in-depth tutorials for installing and/or upgrading CE and SE components. Over half of the sites represented were able to install or upgrade a component while at the workshop, and the remainder completed their upgrades approximately two weeks later.
  
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  OSG documentation for Tier-3s that begins from the point where systems have only an operating system installed. Hence sections for site planning, file system setup, basic networking instructions, and cluster setup and configuration were written together with more detailed explanations of each step. https://twiki.grid.iu.edu/bin/view/Tier3/WebHome.
  
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  Working directly with new CMS and Atlas site administrators as they start to deploy their sites and in some cases are working through their documents.
  
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  Bi-weekly site meetings geared toward Tier-3s in conjunction with the ongoing site coordination effort including office hours held three times every week to discuss issues that arise involving all aspects of the sites. The site meetings are just beginning, and still mostly attended by Tier-2s, but as new Tier-3's start to come online, we expect Tier-3 attendance to pick up.