Open Science Grid¶
About the Open Science Grid¶
The Open Science Grid (OSG) is an NSF funded project that provides high throughput computing to researchers. Many institutions provide access to their computers on which OSG users run jobs when they would otherwise be idle.
The capacity of OSG is quite astounding. On June 8, 2021, OSG delivered over 1.1 million core hours "is equivalent to using 42 thousand cores in just one day."[1]
ARC maintained clusters are designed for high performance computing (HPC), which is really meant for single problems that need to use many machines simultaneously to work on one problem. There are many data problems that consist of many, many small tasks on smallish amounts of data where each task can run entirely independently of the others. Those are the ideal jobs for OSG.
OSG is currently fully funded by NSG and the participating institutions and is free to the users.
Getting your software onto OSG¶
The best way to get all but simple programs onto OSG is by using a Docker container and having OSG import it and make it avaialable as a Singularity container. Creating the Docker container is something that ARC can help with. For those who wish to create their own, please see Preparing a Docker container for use at Open Science Grid.