Registration is now open for the Open Science Grid Campus and National Cyberinfrastructure Workshop, which will take place April 22-23 at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), 100 Europa Drive, Chapel Hill. A registration form is available at http://indico.fnal.gov/confRegistrationFormDisplay.py/display?confId=2504
Researchers and IT administrators, managers and staff at Triangle area campuses and beyond are invited to attend the workshop to learn about large-scale distributed and high throughput computing and how they can
enhance research practices and enable discoveries. The workshop will introduce techniques used in large-scale computational research through hands-on training. Participants also will be introduced to the national community of technical experts that provide this computational infrastructure at campuses across the U.S.
Day one will focus on using the infrastructure and day two will address how campuses can contribute their computational resources to the infrastructure, both at the local campus level and by participating in
national cyberinfrastructure efforts. Attendees can attend day one, day two or both days of the workshop based on their interests and their campus roles.
The Open Science Grid (OSG), a major national grid infrastructure, gives scientists access to more than 80 production sites offering over 30,000 CPUs to advance their research. OSG users and members include
researchers in particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics, bioinformatics, gravitational-wave science and computer science, all contributing to the development of the OSG and benefiting from advances in grid technology. Researchers and software developers in other disciplines, such as mathematics, medical imaging and nanotechnology can also gain from interacting with the OSG community through its partnership with local and regional grids or through their communities’ use of the Virtual Data Toolkit software stack.
Day one, April 22, will be aimed mainly at users and potential users of OSG resources. The focus will be on using campus Condor grids and the national OSG to perform large-scale computations and data-intensive processing. Participants will learn how to use grids of thousands of processors and will be able to continue to use these resources for their research after completing the course. Topics to be covered include:
– Overview of distributed computing concepts and tools
– Concepts, tools, and techniques of grid computing
– Discovering and using grid resources
– Grid scheduling and distributed data management
– Web service and grid service concepts
– Techniques for workflow and collaboration
Day two, April 23, will be aimed primarily at the resource providers. Participants will learn how to build a local campus grid, and share resources at the national level. Day two topics include:
– Overview of campus-level and national-level cyberinfrastructure
– Building a campus grid using Condor
– Joining a campus grid to the OSG
Attendees should have at least intermediate programming skills (one to two semesters experience in C/C++, Java, Perl and/or Python) and hands-on experience with UNIX or Linux in a networked environment.
For questions about the workshop, please email Mats Rynge at rynge@renci.org.
